


ultraviolet

by ruruka



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Non Despair, Soulmate AU, light mentions of drugs and sex and stuff. you know. the usual.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 20:16:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 46,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13395435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: it has no start. it has no end.and they cannot seem to stop tripping over themselves.





	1. Chapter 1

It's nine:twenty two before he dare set toetips past threshold.

Though- dare -he knows not the refusal, yet hasn't anyone but himself alone the recipient's dealer. He bids himself alone the restriction of four roofed walls (though knows it a metaphor plain, and the grandeur of himself alone clutches too neatly to divinity to be so) until he's granted sunlight's relent.

Being considered of the public is mortifying. The public is considerably dwindled by his plan's emission.

Neon flickers to the dainty press of lenses up bridge. Delving through the capital's bustle would paint him a schmuck; tires glide past it all, smooth into the gradient's fade to true dusk that evades tourism and nightlife and mindless  _cha-ching!_  He despises what xeno-degenerates have turned his home into, but feels it a mute point into the turn of hands' golden craft and the refrigeration of his borderline dairy.

And all the same as his pleasure to arrive, to be and exist in quiet night where so limited others dwell to prod his grooves with their neck-knot scrutiny- and all the same he cannot force the altruism, and there's approximately fifteen thousand places he'd rather play resident than the shady selfserve laundromat outside Tokyo. There's no chime above the door when he enters. He supposes that in itself harbors class. Praise follows no farther than his cracking steps.

It's not that it's  _dirty_  (quite the opposite- soap and lilac have been his mistress since that pleasure bound bell-less entrance) but it just isn't  _right_ , and under circumstances that didn't involve the incompetence of an appliance manufacturer, the incompetence of the oh so busy can't-make-it-out-until-Monday-hey-listen-buddy-don't-ask-ME-what-the-fuck-I-get-paid-for  _repair_ man- were it not for everything beneath him so humiliatingly lacking in esteem, he wouldn't be stuffing his button ups into an industrial sized quarter eater that's housed prior  _God_  knows what.

At least, at the very very firkin's bottom twice scraped, there's no one else in the ventilated hollow of the coinwash, and he owes himself the applause that had so halted as the vampiric newcomer. He'd accounted for that.

His touch is diamonds dropped from sleeves and sun glinting. There needn't be any disgust for fingers rolling across metal, across all that is not his aside from his tyranny over earth, as he's no child to shrink away from the unknown. And that's what he'd tell anyone (had he anyone to tell) but the tickle of cat's claws down his esophagus beg him relent; it carries with it some sense of familiarity. But that's even deeper a fall, and he'd buy this lot just to knock it down and give the check back, and he could have surely had a hired hand set the spin cycle and pour in the detergent and all other simpleton's tasks he's just finished in a lean gainst the tall tall washer. Could have. Could do lots of things. Could go across the street to the pharmacy and chase a handful of melatonin with three vodka nips, and it is tempting-  _sure -_ but likewise do his eyes dance toward the reflection of lights on the windows floor to ceiling, and the perfect antonym for joy twists his lungs.

Headlights.

Open. Click. No bell.

If he weren't so flawless in his acuity, he'd be unsure whether the wailing he hears next is true or merely the sound of his agony rattling at skull walls.

" _Shhsh,"_ greets it gently, thick glass of the door clunking to a sharp elbow, holds it open in what seems some waiting. "Come on- nice and warm in here."

He doesn't care to watch, frankly (he's Togami Byakuya, what care should he spend on anyone?), but eyes are drawn to movement by science, and he can't fight against such facts, so he watches, glides sight up the stranger holding the door open to winter gusts that tingle sharply his skin like an absolute idiot. This stranger, whom he already, with his startlingly veracious ability to build the walls of first impression, has pegged a single digit IQ's owner, presses with one far hand the side of a laundry basket to a round hip. At the other sways a carrier to which he grips the handle as the world's paragon- for  _no_  discernible rationale, he's quick to think, as he cannot imagine ever finding value in the screaming, snotting little tantrum wrapped in a long sleeved onesie lain within it. And as if that alone isn't enough- the  _whatever_ this annoying stranger has been letting the cold in for comes toddling inside just before the door is allotted a shut.

The basket drops heavy to the tile aside pristine feet. They shuffle inches to the side. He watches, still so, the delicate motions of this man's hands, small and gentle, pushing the cat-faced hood back behind the impossibly soft brunette on the baby's head. Mumbles and coos beg him to settle, though his fussing only intensifies until the cradle is lifted high by the handle to rest with a stretch of arms atop the washer behind his lean. To bend to another's beckoning is foreign to him, yet he finds himself shooing from the way on perhaps an instinct. He blinks behind slipping lenses, mouth low, tight. The baby shrieks another few notes before fading into the soothe of the machine's dull vibrations. Fingers stuff into his gooey mouth.

"Sorry, I hope you don't mind," snaps his gaze from the quieted soul. "I'll move him once I get my washer running. He's just uppity tonight, ah," His knees bend in their jeans. He spares a moment to turn to the second child, unraveling his scarf to let it hang at either side and spinning back around post a sharp tug of zipper down his chest. Togami eyes him the whole way, can't rip his attention from those hands, gentle and small, lifting a square of pale yellow fabric from the top of the scant laundry pile with two fingers. "-'cause clumsy Dad went and spilled milk all over his favorite blanket, huh? Silly, silly."

His lip sneers at the  _cutesy wittle voooice_ before forcing a turn over the opposite shoulder. He hates that he'd been wrong about no one else doing laundry after sunset. He hates that he'd been wrong in assuming that this babyfaced stranger couldn't possibly have any of his own, and was rather queer for lugging two younger siblings out at this hour. He hates that he's  _still_ talking.

"But there's no sense in wasting a load's worth of coins on just one thing," explains the handfuls of clothing that follow the soiled blanket into the machine. He presses the port door closed in time to the press of a palm to knee, pushes himself to full height with a labored  _oof_. Togami savors the ambiance of the light fixture's buzz. A timidity distracts him from the silence, distracts the other from fiddling with the settings to rest his chin over a shoulder.

"Dad," that second child calls from the room's mirrored half. His hand pats the glass of a vending machine left to placate the idlers. "Candy."

"Oh? Candy, hm?" His short laugh is a tickle of pleasure to Togami's acrid throat. He faces again the buttons to the washer, lifts the metal flap on the front and catches himself in an almost-curse. "Ah, hold on, honey. Forgot the detergent in the car. Silly me." And he sighs lowly, "Again..."

An arm snakes through the carrier to rest at an inner elbow. The little one in it starts up his fussing again, the father of the two trying in desperately to corral the second before it blooms to a full tantrum again. "Come on, Tomo," he calls with fingers fanned. The child offers only disobedience, mesmerized by the brightly colored snacks behind the plexiglass. That faultless analysis returns to Togami in a scan over the stranger's face;  _fatigue. "_ Tomomi, please. Come outside with Dad, we'll be right back in."

Still he does not offer a single centimeter's movement. The baby whines, gets rocked slackly in his carrier while a part finds the desperate man's lips another time.

"Ah...would you mind..?"

The question is left to hang, the most mild hint of awkward in the mix, because  _what the fuck! you don't ask favors from someone you've known for two minutes!_ Togami bristles. Most certainly not. And its match, you don't accept them, either. No, not ever.

"...Go," he snaps finally. Relief shoves him into a short bow before he ducks out into the cold again.

Dominance is his flavor over everything, though he finds himself begging his bones delicate, thinks this three foot tall monster could ask anything of him and he'd supply sans the slightest hesitance.

Children are...charming, he'd call them, some sort of irresistible appeal in their quiet knowledge of near nothing and judgement too fair for ridicule. And this one, eyes wide and curious as they peer upward to him- he shakes his head, shifts scowl toward the clear glass of the exitway. When he next glances back to his newfound charge, those stupidly alluring blue eyes are back on the stupid snack dispensary, and he finds his own stupid stupid stupid steps following the trail.

"What one?" He feels such a blatant fool for attempting a conversation with a someone who doesn't reach his hip in height. A soft finger stretches to point through the glass at some kind of chewy strawberry sugar bomb. Togami sighs in a flip through his wallet. He doesn't even think he carries bills small enough to feed the machine, opting instead for a series of coins intended for the dryer to bring the candy down from its coil. A colorful cat smiles through his fist when it clenches about the wrapper. The boy accepts it without hesitating, seeming unable to peel the cellophane back fast enough and stuff it into his mouth.

It's hardly another two minutes of acquaintance total before the door takes another swing through, and that incessant screaming returns alongside its hushing.

"Alright, got it, got it." To the low rumbling washer top the baby is rested again, detergent shaken in a hand, a second bottle shifting from arm's crook to fingers. "And fabric softener. I'm on top of things." He smiles to himself in soft secret, setting both aside the quieting carrier and pressing free hands to hips in a glance back to the room's other duo. The smile drops a moment in surprise, watches the artificial treat be nibbled further at, plasters back to his face with another of those life-ruining laughs.

"Did you say thank you to the nice man, Tomomi?" The nice man stands beside the child, leant casual to the wall in a cross of all limbs. Crumbs spotting his thin lips, he shakes his head, and  _hell,_ he's honest, and Togami would admire the little fucker if he knew more than a hundred words.

His father snorts, takes to set an example. "Thank you for keeping an eye on him. Here, let me pay you back."

A palm presses upward from its fold practically before he can finish the offer. "I'm certain whatever meager earnings you make are in need of being kept."

He looks a candidate for offense, nearly, though cannot muster the undivided attention long enough to bid it. Head back over shoulder and body chasing, he tuts at the all over again fussy little mess. "Mn- Yukichi _..._ what's the matter now, hmm?"

By evidence, the washing machine lullaby wore off its soothe. Togami thinks every motion of the young man's a long frazzle, thinks so in the scramble of those hands ( _those_  hands...just-) to unbuckle the restraint over the infant and bounce his chubby body against one hip. He smooths back the plush of bangs to press lips to forehead, all the while humming, swaying, pleading serenity. One arm is the support beneath him, the other leaving its caress to tend instead to the retrieved bottles. A cap twists between his fingers. Togami rolls his eyes, moves his feet before he even can conjure the realization.

"Don't be an idiot," captures those hazel eyes in wide blinks upward to him. He takes the hands of his own to either side of this stranger's strange little weepy baby. Presumptuous as ever- who lets someone they've known for six minutes just take their child like that? And who just takes the child of someone they've known six minutes like that?

Togami Byakuya, very apparently, and he's lifted the snot tot right to his shoulder and hushed him in rubs to the back and a sway to the hips, idle and strong and knowing.

Detergent cap in one hand, he seems a starlight gawk toward the brazen act- the  _thievery,_ yet all at once it is likewise the kleptomaniac to sorrow, and he calms into snivels against that expensive blazer.

"Wow..." and it's a marveling, and he's a touch brazen himself in, "I guess you're my soulmate then, huh?"

His eyes thin to a glare, tilts chin higher, resents this mockery made so of him. "I do hope you plan on excusing yourself for such a  _revolting_  offense."

Freed, his hands wave rather in  _de_ fense. "Ah, just a joke. You know, like how all those western romcoms start. Oh, this stranger calmed my baby when I couldn't, now we're gonna fall in love, blah blah blah."

Togami stares back in blank displeasure. His palm pauses its patting to rest beneath child's arm. A wrapper crumples noisily in the room's far corner. Green haze darts there a moment, and this laughter isn't the same rhythmic chortle as before, instead leaking from the pipes in gaucheness. He takes to filling the cups at the front with both oozes of blue liquid.

There's a further series of fusing with dials and settings and all the bits that make up etcetera, but he bothers not to spare it his focus; rather he chooses to set it on the warmth in his arms. The baby- this... _Yukichi,_ harbors the same charm as his brother (now crumb faced and sticky fingered and knelt beside his father with a mouthful of silence as he observes) that renders him of practical uselessness. He strokes a knuckle down the fat of his squishy cheek, stammers in the chest at the tiny yawn it provokes before the finger is captured within a set of ones much more befitting fragility. Too close, too close. Yet, catching him pull back- unheard of.

"He likes you," the other comments, the one he's near forgotten existed, even. He glances up toward him, takes in the lengths of black denim and converse, jacket zipped half up his middle and undershirt graphic. His hair's a mess of cowlicks, seemed tamed by shorter chops at one time then altogether abandoned the upkeep of- he can picture it, nearly. And he thinks, still, that this man's hardly of age to have bred twice over, though thinks himself the least likely candidate to take so quickly to three noisy messy people he's never met once in his own thirty years, and never again would care to meet. The hold on his finger wiggles it. He likes children, is all. He likes the idea of the future. But the present is taking it away from him in a push of sleeves to elbows and hands neath shoulders. A band of charms gleams at one wrist now bare, and he'd scoff in the disbelief of it being afforded by its bearer. That bearer  _ah'_ s in the acceptance of his child back to his hip, smiling in sweet, sweet coos toward him. Togami thinks this winter is biting.

Settled, they lax into nothing, as there needn't be more, needn't be even all that has been, and they're strangers who've exchanged far too many favors in...he's lost track of how many minutes, but knows it still too little an offering to play amiable. He knows not even yet this person's-

"Naegi," comes in a startle. His blinks are a diver's yanked to surface. No time is allowed for him to readjust himself to atmosphere, though, and  _Naegi_ goes on chattering, "And, mh- Yukichi," he bumps slightly the baby at his side, reaches a hand out next to ruffle the light locks of the final, standing stupefied by the whirring spin of clothes and suds behind the porthole. "And Tomomi. My two favorite people."

Togami would adore the feel of slicing the sunshine from his smile. Stupid people smile at everything. Stupid people repeat introductions already given. Stupid people do laundry at ten PM.

"Live around here?" It snaps him from the boiling kettle of his brain. His arms go to cross, though rest just the same as they'd found minutes prior already. He frowns.

"I exist everywhere and nowhere at once. Where I so happen to take permanent residency is not the subject of  _smalltalk_ in a laundromat."

He draws back into himself. "Oh." Throat takes a swallow, tosses out a slicked laugh. "Well, uh, do you visit here a lot, then?"

Stupid stupid stupid st- "Absolutely  _what_ business is it of yours? I do not know you, nor you myself. We have no further relationship than I having interacted with your children. I like children. I  _don't_ like you."

A flinch takes him. "...Yeah, um...sorry. It's just," he pauses whilst adjusting Yukichi higher on his hip, "I feel like I know you from somewhere."

Gorgeous blue eyes swivel in a push of glasses back over them. "I'm sure you do. From hundreds of magazine covers, constant press coverage, online articles detailing the most successful and power-riddled conglomerate in the nation- Need I go on?"

Lips take a purse, thin brows met. "Mmm...do you have a twin brother?"

And he's to scoff out the answer, "If I had, he'd be as dead as every other failure who dared share my blood. Any more questions?"

The next conversation is betwixt himself and his machine's chime; he spins round to face it. The screen displays a bright green check. Cycle complete.

He's hunched shoveling damp clothes into a cart when the next arises.

"...We're out closer to Yokohama," he lets, "But it's not too far a drive, and it's worth it for the nicer neighborhood."

"Why not just  _move,_ if that's the case?" He forces irritation from his throat to mask that he's carried on the conversation by choice, now, pushing the wheeled basket across the room to the dryers.

The recipient leans back against the newly emptied washer, shutting it with his back in a rest. "Well...I don't know, really, ah- I've lived there since I was twenty five, in that same apartment. Doesn't really feel like... _home_ , though, to be honest..."

"That fails to surprise me." To its frame the door slams, and he turns to face the other across the way. "A shitty apartment in Yokohama is no place to raise children."

That look takes him again, one of asinine offense taken toward truth. "Who said it was shitty?"

"Bad word," admonishes him from below.

Togami cannot stop his checkmate's smirk. "No laundry on site."

Where there before had glown flame's flickers, a crack of blue stripes cross the tips and he finds himself matched in the haughty humor of a simper. Naegi shrugs one shoulder, adjusts arms higher again. Yukichi yawns into a rest forward at his protector's chest, earns the gentle brush of a chin atop his head.

"I guess you've got me there," and he'd forgotten nearly at all. "I'll look into it more, probably. Hey- looking for three roommates?"

"Not in three lifetimes," he's quick to respond, and Naegi's already pushed past the cusp of chuckles again. They skid stopped once he ventures, in a nod toward his hand, "Though you imply no fourth?"

Color perks his pale, and Togami despises the way he's taken it, but has no chance to right his intent before he's met; Naegi curls the fist about the ring on his left's second finger. "It's...complicated."

Understandable, common. Foolish all the same. He speaks null of it, and thinks himself in an odd sort of rank for romance- but it isn't something he'd divulge a second's worth. Inappropriate, all of it, and he thinks himself behaved as so in his questions, and he'd rather pull the half dried clothing out right now than have to stay in the stink of another's presence a moment longer. But...but it's his domain- the  _world_ -and feeling discomfort in existence within it lacks the passion of his step.

"I suppose it cannot be helped, by the classless, irresponsible likes of you."

A perk, peculiar. "Irre-?"

"The average bedtime for a three year old is eight PM." An index leaves the fold of arms to point toward the one in question, having since blinked away from the trance of the stopped washer. Togami glares in total command at the trio, examination faultless to the twitch courting Naegi's brow as he tucks the youngest back into his carrier, allows himself a kneel to haunches to tug clothing into a basket. "It's ten:sixteen. You've dragged him out to do laundry, consequently disrupting the essential hours of sleep that are so crucial to his development. And that one-" The finger switches to the baby atop the washers, drooling over a teething ring stuffed into his mouth. "A year old, I presume. Six PM. And you've hardly dressed him warm enough to be out in December."  _Scoff._  "You're the perfect example for adolescents everywhere; just because your body is mature enough to reproduce means nothing as to whether or not your mind is."

From his position on the floor, he rolls his eyes in delinquency. "Jeez, I didn't know you were the God of childcare. I'm doing my best, okay?"

"Your  _best_ is going to end both your sons up in fostercare while you mope alone in your drug-slum corner of the city wondering what went wrong."

Naegi rises, basket clutched to his side and clothes hot and wet within. Togami cannot say he finds the glower tossed toward him  _intimidating_  and still be a man of his word through and through; he'll permit  _cute._ Not so cute in the sense of its natural, cute in the way thrown toward children attempting adulthood before they've grown out of overalls and playground-fever. Cute.

"That's mean, dude," furthers the definition. "You shouldn't say that kind of thing to someone you just met. I don't even know your name."

And-  _oh_  -it's just his favorite thing to lilt, to embellish his perfection and leave his traces branded gainst brain's grooves when all else has vacated. "Togami Byakuya."

And- ...oh? -it's the rush of wind that musses hair and chaps skin, and the door is blown through just the same in a dash forward, collecting his belongings and tugging scarfs, hoods, zippers back to their homes, and he's alone in a laundromat at ten:twenty two PM.

The only other car rips from the lot in a hot smog into cooled air. Behind his head whirs the latent noise of low tumble dry.


	2. Chapter 2

Crayon Shin-chan ends at eight on weeknights. It's seven:thirty-nine when he feels his pant leg tugged, and guesses in the slight pause between scrubbing sippy-cups that his calf bears now a sticky handprint.

"What is it, Tomo?" he hums in a glance down. "Aren't you watching your show?"

"I saw this one," comes his reply, in that  _duh, Dad_ tone of voice he has to wonder the origin so frequently.

Soap flicks from the delicate angles of fingertips in a shake. "Hmm..." He exchanges a towel betwixt the rivulets trailing each hand. "Wanna go to bed early?"

That glimmer of hope he finds guilt in fades out regardless when the little boy tosses his head in refusal. His own lips purse to further thought, knuckles to a hip and eyes surveying. They match again to the heart-melters peering blankly up to him. "Wanna help me wash the dishes?"

Again is the metronome of his head rattling, and his father has to laugh at the wit past his own tongue. It comes to slow heat anew, a long syllable of thought to waste the clock's ticks. Rather, after he hasn't an epiphany himself, the other grasps ideas.

"Wanna go in car."

His lips make slant. "It's too late for that, sweetness. No sunshine outside."

A finger prods toward the tiny window above the kitchen sink, just to prove himself, and the little one tilts his chin up to assure himself as well; shadows glide through wisping night as exhaust passes in the street below. Dirtied snow lines either side. His son's head tips to one side.

"Wanna go car, Dad."

"No car tonight," draws a pout to that tiny mouth. "Yuki's asleep, we can't just leave him, mm? And it's so cold, and dark, and...yucky." A sigh ghosts against his turn back to tend the sullied plates, a whisper for himself sole, "And gas is four hundred yen a gallon..."

An egg yolk stain distracts both he and his scrub brush. There's a moment dedicated to flashing eyes over one shoulder, though catching the last toddles toward the living room lax his confidence enough to relent. The television buzzes lowlit chimes of childhood behind him. Further does he bend to the softness to a sigh, lashes to cheek in gentle remedy.

Shoulders dip in the slide of endurance from them, if only for this moment, if only Twain's gilded age. He  _can_ think, but doesn't  _have to,_  and that to him is bliss. Not so far as a year's light would it be he finds no love for the two lone bearers of his heart, but it's nice to not have to think about scrubbing heat caught chocolate from the carpet's fibers, or bite his lip each time he should spot the caller ID for Harukawa Daycare during his morning shift at the diner down the way (and subsequently the caller ID for the diner down the way once he's home soothing the wails of this year's third ear infection). And to ignore, likewise, that all he's to think about not having to think about is that his parenthood has taken over a master status as a  _human_ , very practically. When could he claim was the last time he'd replied to an inviting text without that perpetual  _:-(_  apology, or- the plate sets into the slats of the drying rack. He runs warm water over a handful of faux silverware.

Maybe he'd ought to designate a day off soon. Kyouko wouldn't mind taking her nephews for an afternoon, he's sure.

When his ears crack in the thunder of yowls, he shoves the date that much sooner.

" _Yukichiii,"_ moans he in a tip of the head backward. The emptied sink is his only solace in the strangling second, taking a heel to pass through the lowlight and the twin bedroom sharing the wall to his own.

Night lamp rays kiss soft the pale of the furniture, the white painted rails of the crib at the far wall. A tut catches in his throat at the soft hands poking through them.

"Tomo, what are you doing?" His own hands sunder those that pester at the fussing baby's cheek to lift him to a shoulder. Yukichi gasps as though all breath has been thieved from him.

Upward beams those innocent eyes, fingers clutching two guard rails. "No car 'cause Yuki's sleeping. He comes, too, now."

Palm pats, knees bounce, throat clenches in groaning. "Togami Tomomi, I swear you'll be the death of me."

"What's that mean, Dad?"

He chooses reticence in the face of it. Baby to a hip, he crouches back into the crib to a handful of pale yellow, presses it soft to his heaving chest. There's a shifting within his arms, a settling as the fabric exchanges clutches. The cries die to hiccuping coos, though cease not yet to calmed silence.

"You want to eat, hm?" offers he in a patting to his back and a trail from the room. Little feet patter behind his own.

Again the kitchen gains his presence, fingers round handle round- round  _nothing,_ because the time after dishes are done is designated for preparing the next day's bottles, and he pins himself a perfect idiot yet again in tune to placing child to highchair. A swing around to cabinets, drain, sink, fridge; he sits in his own chair across his son's, careful to slide the blanket aside in turning half the tray to a working station.

"Dad," draws his eyes to the pats at his bent knee. "Up."

Only mildly does he sigh. "Not now, honey."

He scoops a tablespoon of formula powder into the water. The touches persist.

"Up, Dad."

"In a minute, Tomomi,  _please._ " To most it'd breathe pathetic to be imploring a three year old in such a fashion, huffing outward a headache. Another scoop- but is it the second or third? Between the pleas, the tired cries, the dereliction creeping up his vertebral column,  _oh how he craves the thunk of forehead to hardwood-_

"Dad."

A pinch to his eyes. He decides whichever scoop it is, it's enough (and far too expensive to risk wasting) to begin mixing together. " _What,_ sweetheart?"

"Wanna go  _caaar_."

It takes two to make a child because it takes two to raise one, he's long since decided. Had he any clue where his second lie- "Tomorrow, okay? I promise."

Up his thigh runs two hands, patter patter patter, until his attention's collected fully to their source. The lift to his right hand concerns him not, shaking it in vigor whilst the left goes to pet gently the light silks of his hair. "We can drive over the bridge and everything."

Beneath his palm, the soft bones nod in allure's agreement. He lets forward the ginger curve of a smile, turned moon eyes back toward the task at second hand, where it instantly takes fall. "Ah, shit."

It takes two, because he hadn't noticed the drips trailing his forearm, the intensified whines in wake of the flicks of liquid to nose, the asininity to dance through his fingertips in their work to screw the bottle cover on  _just_  sideways enough to turn the highchair tray into a puddle of powder clouded water. He ignores the low chiming  _bad wooord_ in favor of hopping spiritedly to a slide of socks to tile, dropping the bottle to the emptied sink and flicking his fingers after it.

" _Honey_ ," breathes he once toward the mess of a churning tantrum. He wipes Yukichi's flush cheeks with a towel's corner, moving once he's kempt to sop the half serving spilled to the tray. He weaves around the blockade twisting between his ankles to meet again the sink, voice sweet in tired concern. "It's okay, Yuki, Dad's gonna get you a new bottle. You're alright, you've got your- your blanket..." Eyes drop to the wet-heavy square of pale yellow fabric in his grasp. "...Ah, shit."

Behind him, in a mingle to the shrieking, lips pop once smoothly. "Car?"

_Mild,_ mild sigh, elbows to counter and face pressed against.

"Yep...car."

It's ten minutes of buttons and mittens and zippers galore. Icing on the cupcake, he wraps about the each of them a scarf, ushering his oldest out the door as it takes his key's turn in a close. He prays all through the ice ridden streets that the mid city laundromat has a closing time not daunting, pushing prayers to win the Lotto 6 and afford an apartment with a washer/dryer to the back burner for the moment.

A glance graces his rear view's reflection, and he supposes it isn't too thick a loss when Tokyo's lights reflect so sweetly off blue eyes wide in amazement toward the window. One tiny hand rests to one even more so (and how that's possible, he does not question, only accepts nature and her breath stealing miracles) as if to lull the scorch of his throat pouring such a stream of displeasure.  _You really screwed up, Dad,_ he imagines would surface if it could be,  _You have one job besides the two you work and you can't even tell the difference between a towel and the one thing I hold dear to me in life?!_

Sorrow ruins his porcelain face.

Arrival at their destination is a near disappointment, though rather he steal the stars from one son's eyes and be done with the whole day's affairs than continue on decimating the other's lungs. There's another car in the lot in the farthest corner off, which does not surprise him so much so as it concerns, but he hasn't time to bother with it and he decides silently that thugs don't drive Mercedes of the current year. Collecting everything and everyone is a natural hassle, first going for seatbelts undone and hands under arms.

"Stay right here," he tells sternly to Tomomi, standing at his legs to the click shut of the backdoor. The second opens not a moment later, snapping the carseat from latches and grasping its handle (the one thing he's most glad he'd been spoiled with from his registry, and he decides whoever thought to make a carseat and carrier in one is a fucking saint). He notices the strip of knit blue strewn to the backseat, though chooses wisely to avoid the uphill battle of forcing a scarf back onto a fussy infant in favor of gathering the laundry basket to a hip and rearing their third member forward to the blinding lights of the laundromat.

He coaxes the blank staring at the brightness out with promises of the warmth it carries. The bait is taken, and he grants that warmth its space to keep with a shutting again to the door.

Evidently, he hasn't been so quick as to rid the inside of biting chill; instantly does he notice that current year Mercedes trust fund baby leant in supremacy aside his spin cycle.

But, it's rude to make assumptions.

But, yet has he to see a full suit and tie in a public laundromat even off of a body.

He regrets the judgement in a clock's spitting, as this stranger's been none the perfect prick to make a scene over borrowing his machine's top for a soothe. It's enough to unhinge the easy trust of his mouth to jog past pleasantries whilst he crouches to relinquish each child of their clearance rack confinements. The next second is a stuffing of clothes into washer, and he finds himself unable to recall a free moment since he'd missed a period four years ago.

In the tangle of thoughts and actions and swallowed apprehension, he forgets that his mouth's running on its motor ( _again_ ), catches himself in a color of embarrassment as he shifts his weight back to his feet. The stranger's standing still the same, cross in arms, legs, temper. He wonders at all if he'd been heard, though has to silence the notion in face of a new one birthed.

"Oh? Candy, hm?" He laughs, because he'd sooner keel than stuff a toddler full of artificial sugar past the sun's leave. Another distraction will clasp him soon enough, he thinks, goes back to tending the washer. To the realization that he'd been so overtaken himself by the scarf lain in the car's seat to remember the detergent on the floor below it- well, he'd accept that flavorsome keel should it tempt him now.

Ambrosia is the tall handsome laundromat phantom with that single allowance, after the saccharine fiend's refused compliance and the fuss has returned to the one at his hip, and if the walls weren't pure glass or he'd driven a station wagon, he doubts he'd have given up so easily the fight gainst the silence.

The moment they're alone, back to the cell stiffening frost, he notes mentally to type up apology letters to all the surrounding residents who've just been tumbled from sleep by his child's relentless cries. It shatters his heart, very closely, and would strike him out in totality were it not so mushily huge and thrumming most always. He hushes him, working in quick strides to grasp each bottle from the back while the twenty pound tear ball rests atop it.

A thousand thoughts mute in the clunk of his skull back to the car's top lip on his exit. He winces, though powers forward, shoving shut the door with his only free part, and he wishes he had now a hand to swipe the snow scuff transferred from car door to the ass of his jeans.

But he'd rather get back to ensure his son's still got a head to his neck than bother over a wet smudge on his pants. Cool- it's everything he can play with his assurances as he enters, ditches Yukichi and his foul mood to the rumbling machine in the midst. A turn around meets his eyebrows in the center, and wonders how brash he'd have to turn to ask this stranger when he plans on coming over to tend to the hyperactive monster he's just created through his  _generosity._ Rather, it's a laugh, a chortle in place of fatigue swollen impudence.

He regrets smartly the decision in the following oust of that polite veneer, when it is a two for two of wise (the kind a mother says, not Webster) comments dragged down his skin. "Don't be an idiot."  _Thanks, I'm cured!_ But there's not a sentence in a child rearing book in the world that says  _hand your one year old to a stranger in a laundromat at ten PM,_ yet he finds himself sans the warmth of a baby in his hold in lieu of a bottle of store brand Tide. The loop he's thrown for casts him a complete fool tripping over teeth, speaking nonsense on the grounds that...that it's just instinct to find a hot man hotter with a baby in his arms, it's science, and he can't argue with such facts even if he's making a cretin of himself in the process.

_Awkward_ paints the canvas of their conversation as it fades to null. He busies his hands setting up the washing machine for success, though cannot tuck himself far enough within the bounds of buzzing mind to keep his gaze to his own deeds; "He likes you," he allows before he's thought it over, taking in the way his sweetheart's being admired so, the itty bitty fingers squeezing the big one within them. It's soft, he thinks. It's gentle.

He takes over the soft and gentle in a reclaiming of his child, and can't help the dirty smirk at the scent of Burberry lingering on his kitty onesie. Charming. He decides to be charming himself, lilting a tender introduction of he and his charges, niggled at reciprocation's absence. It'd been mainly a prompt for it, anyway, as something's tugged him aside from handsome:  _familiar._

Once he's dared the boldness, the vulnerability, he's shot down so solidly he's shocked there doesn't spurt from his side a bullet wound's gush. They take on the quick back and forth of discussion, each return finding more blood trickling from that wound. This stranger's handsome, this stranger's familiar, though he begins to wonder if that memory is drawn from the haze of nightmare. In the minutes they've held acquaintance, he's dropped a decade's worth of smartassery. And he dares prove himself so daring as to inquire to his relationship-  _was that flirti-?_

But there lives no time to ponder on it, and maybe it's held salacious undertones after all, since his mother had always said boys at recess were mean because they  _liiiked_ you, but if this guy keeps on with these  _jabs,_ especially those taken toward his skill as a parent, he'd rather have a crush in its literal.

"That's mean, dude," he says once he's pushed to his edge. Juvenile; still better than the outright  _go fuck yourself_  he envisions. "You shouldn't say that kind of thing to someone you just met. I don't even know your name."

He's still breathless by the time he's made it to the living room couch.

There's just no way.

A mess of paper litters the coffee table. He'd made record time in getting his boys down for bed, each perhaps sensing somewhere in the back of minds the gravity through their father's eyes, laid themselves obediently on either side of their bedroom in the close of lids and hush of mouths. It leaves him sole to drop trembles to the crumbled ticket beneath his fingers.

Really, there's just no way.

He supposes certificates don't lie, those of both birth and of marriage, but- but what shall oppose that? He supposes, too, he would not fool himself so, and this certainly looks to be of his own penning if not a meticulous forgery. His fingers spread to smooth it, the torn off corner of a notebook page, tucked to his shirt's pocket upon one first morning's breath.

_Togami Byakuya- your husband._

Beneath it, an opposing line of cursive reads the digits of an address. Violent come his quivers next in a fall back into the sofa cushions.

He'd been bitched out in a laundromat at ten PM by his husband and parent to his children.

Romantic.

But- but,  _but!_ He throws himself forward, shoving aside the note that carries still the scent of shoved in a drawer for six months to walk his eyes across those deceitless certificates.

_This Certifies That_ Togami Byakuya & Naegi Makoto  _Were United In The Holy Bonds Of Matrimony._

Those same two manuscripts. He continues onward, blanching at a time stamp of five years exact to the date.

He's not sure why it curls him in such astonishment on its own, the date being meaningless in the wake of such the whole. How could they be wed for so long, but how could they be wed for a moment's taste rings the same. Decided is it that the word of the day-  _how._

Next goes his attention to the pair of faded documents citing the lives official of two favorite people.

_This Certifies That Togami Tomomi-_

_-That Togami Yukichi was born to Naegi Makoto and-_

"Togami Byakuya..." The syllables makes his tongue itch. In tandem he finds a delicious tingle roll up his spine, unnameable, unobtainable.

The papers slap to the table top again, catching the smallest into his hip pocket in a trade for the phone in it. Dial tone walks him back into his coat, to the slightest tap of door opened to meet gentle breaths in rest. An answer clicks unto his ear, and despite his remorse for the tired grog at the greeting, five years to the exact date's worth of energy surges his rush to indulgence.

"Kyouko, it's me." Hands fumble for keys through a pocket. " _Please-_ I need you to babysit."


	3. Chapter 3

"Were you a stalker in a past life?" The room is dark against them- hard oak and no reflections. His fingers press steepled at their pairs, chair back higher than the imperial halo of his head and shoes a mirror to his visitor's harsh lungs. "Because you remind me an awful lot of one of my own. She smelled like cat shit and had the personality to match."

He thinks he'd quite like the supervillain role.

But the hero stands before him now, five feet of murder and peril knit into the grooves of his face. Still he blends into the night in his gothic strands of an outfit, though perhaps just a touch better does it match his demeanor, exchanged sunshine for moonlight's coils (he's surprised he still had the receipt). Uncertainty should not ever fit his shoulders, most particularly not in his own riches' bounds. It was just  _difficult_ to deny the gleam of headlights breaking the dusk of his front lawn, the sharpness to the knocker falling to his front door from the lion's fangs that clench it gold. More than he's given credit for, he's a  _scientist,_ defined further, perhaps a sociologist, endlessly delighted by the stupidity of man and how he's been trained to behave as so. This is just a new case for his studies; pick apart the pieces that led to the etiquette of following a stranger home from the laundromat and knocking on his door an hour before post turns again ante. How fortunate was he to not have been shot on sight, rather permitted entry by the lean and cunning scientist with all the hospitality of the sweetest grandmother (though her ears and teeth have looked stunningly large lately).

He's glad the hip cargo hadn't come with him.

"That depends," Naegi says slow, eyes lava lamps of luminescent scarlet. "Did you marry her, too?"

That steeple melts to instead rest his face to folded knuckles. And he smirks, because that's the theatrical way to answer such choking insanity. "I married a bullet to her cervical vertebrae. The ceremony was just captivating, really." His lips flick devastating beneath the stars' glow. "And I'll do the same to you once I get the information I need. Now, be a good boy and tell Daddy how you got past the entry code on the gate. Who told you, was it that Kuzuryuu fellow? Has he got it out for me for burning his correspondence? As if I'd sell stock to someone who gets offered crayons at Kozue."

Their stares are antitheses in their slow coolness versus high chinned leering. Another moment draws silence before that smirk goes to a part once more.

"Go on, I'm a busy man. Oh- and let me know which you prefer, M9 or .44?"

The tongue that smooths cross his mouth is noted; anxiety. "You told me."

How brash a sweet little idiot this subject is. He laughs, just so, subtle syrup to his shortstack in disquiet. "Have you fallen, hit your head? Do you require medical care? My dear, it seems you've come down with amnesia. Or batshit insanity, take your pick."

His clever soul knows no bounds absolute. Behind his lenses (that he'd make gleam now had he the power) eyes fall soft shut, and they open with the drop of theatrics and lift of head. A crimped paper reaches for his touch. He glances to the  _look_ raining on him, back to the paper offered, snatches it before his perception has a chance to notice.

_Togami Byakuya- your hus-_

"What the  _hell_ kind of act are you trying to pull on me?" There spikes his rise to feet to accompany temper. The shred of a notebook crumples further, swallowing into the wormhole of his fist the scrawled disgust and coordinates beneath it. More so than the handwriting he's seen across every check, every document, every note to grant vendetta's fire, it's the address with his name; the fuzzed rim to his mind conjures that Minato street corner, three stories of white concrete and the finest lines of gingkos down the trailing path. He smells the thick of their wood, and something behind his eyes grows taut.

He's never once lived there.

"I'm-"

"This little scrap of  _paper_ doesn't explain a thing, other than that you've very blatantly gone mad," presses in he next. "This isn't my address, I have no affiliation whatsoever there."

"That's why I spent twenty minutes in my car Googling your name," he says, as if it's any help to fend off the  _stalker_  accusations. "I mean- I don't know, you gave me the wrong address, so I looked you up and found all that...stuff you were talking about, you know, the magazines and whatever. In hindsight if I'd just done that months ago-"

"You have thirty seconds to convince me not to sic wolves on you for intruding in my home."

His eyes lose their animosity in a blink into vastness. "I- You let me in..? No, okay, um-" Breath outlets harsh. He folds his arms in listening to the rambles. "I went to your office building, that was easy to find. Weird that it's open twenty four hours, but I guess that's how big business works- But, uh, a secretary gave in after a sad story about a single father, you know, just trying to make ends meet-"

"Tell me what the fuck your motives are this second or I'll-"

"You're my  _husband,_ " he insists, hands empty in their pleading hang forward. "You're my husband, you're- you're the father of my  _children,_ Byakuya, I-"

" _Do not_ call me that, you sniveling rodent." Molars clench, fist matching around that slip. "You think just because you manage to infiltrate my life for a half an hour's total, and come up with a sickening fantasy to launder money from me f-"

"Money? You think I want your money?" It comes out as though he's vomited up the most vile stretch of an idea he's met. A step falls once backward. "I wouldn't make this up, I-I couldn't. There's birth certificates, marriage licenses- that note, that's your handwriting, isn't it?"

The dip of his head downways relents not, gaze hard metallic. Lungs shudder against harrowing quiet. "Get out of my house.  _Now."_

"Byakuya, please, I-"

"Don't call me that," he says again, at last snaps up into a staring match over again. "I don't know you. You saw me in a filthy laundromat and decided to make me the next victim in your scheme to live off the fat of my labor. You have no right, Naegi Makoto, you have absolutely  _no right_ to attempt to make a fool of me this way for your benefit. You're the luckiest bastard alive that I haven't called the police already." He glides from his spot in the foyer to shove open the front door. Breeze tantalizes the tips to his perfect blond. " _Never_  let me see your pathetic face again, if you're so smart as you pretend."

Freezing. Silence, until the softest push of a feather's land from his lips. "...I never told you my first name."

The clench to a hundred muscles falls all together, color running from face, effort drifting from will to expose bared nature.

Chasing is the pull on cotton to toss to slicked asphalt, and the slamming of the exitway echoes in his ears until the next morning's dawn finds his eyes have yet to close.


	4. Chapter 4

There's a fruit basket outside his front door after his ten to four shift ends at BuddyLand Shoes.

He'd nearly  _felt_  the sigh of relief from the daycare staff once his 2005 Corolla had parked out front. White had begun painting the grass since early afternoon, falling now in powdered sugar flurries that turn the bundle in his baby carrier a soft beignet of cooing interest.

"Mh, you like the snow, huh?" And he smiles to himself, the first genuine one all day (in opposition to the  _yes, of course, I'd love to check in the back for the size 20.3s I just said we don't carry,_ and _, oh, I can't wait to fit your dirty sweaty Keds for new laces, sir-_ ) that meets him. He glances behind to bid their last forward, having paused for the third time to admire nature's magnificence from the sky above him. He tilts his head down, chasing after the beckoning call of his name and accepting the hand that reaches for his mittened one.

They scale the sets of stairs to their home, melting into the indoor wrap of felt flame in comparison, and there he sees it; topped protectively in plastic, presenting all it has to offer on poked sticks to the center. It's one of those exorbitant kind in every other commercial between afternoon middle-aged mother soaps, built up to look like wedding's flora and therefore twice as expensive as a normal bowl of grapes and pineapple. His chest goes tight.

"What's that?" Tiny hands patter the plastic over the top curiously. Naegi hums idle, stepping over it to place the first baby to the adjacent kitchen counter and corral the second one inside.

"Ah, I don't know, honey." He crouches to peel from him hat, coat, gloves, boots, all the while his attention goes a lighthouse round and lands the spotlight back toward the foreign item. "A present, I think."

"Present," he says as any child would, falling twin to a hound in the face of fresh hung kill. His father presses a smile-tight kiss to a wind chapped cheek.

"Go wash up, and you can have a snack, okay?"

The prospect's enticing enough to push him toward the bathroom. He lingers a moment to watch the steps unto the plastic stool before the basin, the turning on and lean of hands. In muted assurance, he turns back to the vacant hall, glances to nothing at either side, and collects the basket by the bottom to set on the counter with an ankle hooked to the door.

Arms outstretch on his arrival beside him, to which he tends vaguely with the drop of mushy sentiments and pushing back of kitten hood. The gift takes his attention once Yukichi is satisfied enough by the pacifier in his mouth and the gentle rock of his cradle by one hand. Its match goes to remove the covering, freeing the fruit to absorb the apartment's stuffy ambiance. He doesn't hear a ticking, which he supposes is a good sign, doesn't fall in immediacy to his knees frothing once he plucks a cantaloupe carnation up and bites off its red grape center. Nothing to beg for, but...alright. He's still chewing when those same dainty fingers go to flit through the center for a-  _bingo -_ card of some sort. Ignoring the company's floral branding, he flips it to the second side, and is reminded on instinct of drizzly Minato streets.

_I remember you don't like fruit._

He smirks hard to himself.

"Snack." His focus is drawn below. Tomomi prods a finger toward his waiting mouth. "Ahh."

His smirk moves to a simper in tenderness. He picks a bit of pineapple cut to a star shape and offers it to eager reaching fingers. The sharp ended stick drops to the trash.

Roughly, he agrees there to be ten million things to think over at once. Hands grip the counter's lip in a lean forward, gaze smoky out the white tinged window. He finds he's handled such a situation more...more  _coolly_ than most. So he's got a husband he just met. So he's got a six foot tall face naturally contoured absolute in your business prick for a husband, who lives in a mansion in Tokyo and does his own laundry. And he's just sent a fruit basket to apologize for leaving his cheekbone asphalt bruised the night prior. How lovely.

More than anything, he hasn't lost his mind over it all because...there exists that humming in his heart to fight it. He's got a husband, he'd been in love at one point, had children, had a  _life._ Every bit of him screams nonplus, though every other bit answers back that divinity's intervention is not a thing to argue with. Reincarnation to the midst of someone else's burdens, struggles- perhaps, though that has brought alongside the memories of adolescence, first kiss, first job. In fact- in strangling, barking, deprived fact -he holds to him every memory imaginable of a young man, though a handful of them seem as though the photographs have had the heads scissored out by a grief drawn ex in the tangle of mascara smears and emptied Ben and Jerry's. He can recall the first week of his plight as a waiter in the downtown diner- what, now seven years back? He remembers the mist of his lips saying in such timidity,  _ah, you're my very first customer,_ but to who, that he draws his blank upon, though he'd guess strongly that it lives the same of the one who'd slipped love letters beneath his breakfast mugs, kissed him every birthday for the number he's had (plus one for good luck- who'd said that so devilishly charming as to color his face then and now?), who'd spoiled and pampered him, fucked him the backseat of the Cadillac that one night on the beach after fireworks literal and internal, and told the sweetest mess of a surprise to two weeks later with hands wringing and pulse deafening.

"Dad," that surprise does so again now, hammer to the glass of his stupor. "Ahh."

A palm brushes over his eyes once, draws back downward in a new hint of glazed wet. Yukichi sleeps in his rocker gone stilled on the counter aside him. Tomomi stares expectantly to him, to which breaks a strong respiring. He reaches to the basket, and places a strawberry down into his hands.

Another loses its spot on the kebab by the dainty pick of glossed pink nails.

"Who sent this fancy schmancy thing?" his sister asks him, biting it from the stem as an owl decapitates a rabbit.

It's ten minutes to the start of his Friday night seven to twelve at the diner down the way. He's a bustle to wrap layers over his uniform top, scarf curling at his shoulders by the panic of fingers quick.

"I don't know, someone from work," he dismisses, zipping coat to throat. "I really need you to get here on time, Komaru. I'm going to be late now. Again."

"It's not  _my_ fault I can't ride my motorcycle in a blizzard," she mumbles around a mouthful of grapes. A dozen bare sticks poke from the bouquet. "Take the car."

He protests further in fishing through jacket pockets. "I can't take the car, what if there's an emergency? You can't rely on the train for that."

"I'll call Kuwata," is her great panacea, and he watches in time the drop of her chewing mouth to a lax flat. "...You know what, you should really get going, four blocks is a lot longer in a snow storm."

Two banknotes slap to the counter top in time with his lolling gaze. "Get something for dinner. Love you."

Her hands take to waving him goodbyes whilst his wrap about the knob to leave, glancing to the open living room, aglow in evening cartoon's light and fingers smearing against the screen. Tiny babbles coax his heart nearly to stay, but it is those decisions that leave nothing to fund all that draws out the murmurs. He tugs his hat down over his ears, and takes to the stairs.

Four blocks  _is_ (thanks Komaru) much longer in a snow storm; he cannot place the sidewalk's bounds precisely even as he fights them in every step. His fingers feel blue by the time he breathes in the scent of hotcakes and hangovers. His time card swipes before the snow's had time to melt from his hair. Seven:oh:seven.

"Do you not want this job, or something?" his manager barks the second he's to turn back. "I get you've worked here half your damn life, but you don't got tenure yet, kiddo."

"Right," he tells her in a bow, shedding down to his pale sandstone uniform polo. "I'm sorry, it won't happen again."

The bold cherry of her lips puckers, then dashes a thumb over her shoulder. "Just get out there. Andou's been working your shift for ten minutes already."

_Andou earns her weight in tips by plucking the buttons off her top,_ he thinks, but doesn't say it, because he don't got tenure yet.

He steals his coworker's spot, penning the orders of two gentlemen in matching shirts for a moving company he's never heard of. The dinner rush begins its trickle inward, multiplied this time of year for holiday tourists and their  _oh, there's a little hole in the wall cafe, they look like they serve warm coffee,_ and he's aflame with the pleasure of this weekly shift for such. The foreigner lifting his finger in the air from a booth down the wall, however, lights him with the lust for instant liberation.

Forty five minutes of nonstop back and forth, waiting tables and clearing them afterward, winking and smiling and flirting his way into a pocketful of fifteen percents. He's pinning an order to the ticket wheel at the front, humming the little lovesick tune melting from the low sound speaking system, when the bell alerts him to a new entrance. He spins on a heel to greet before one of the waitresses can coerce him into their sections.

The welcoming does not escape him before he's sealed into a start. The pen in his grasp slips, but is caught tranceless enough to be stuck into an apron pocket, and he clears his throat the slightest. And he grins.

"Were you a stalker in a past life?"

Togami does not flinch. Flecks of snow look out of place on the shoulders of his dark peacoat, gaze steely in its scan over restaurant's length.

"I'm here to have breakfast, not to speak with you," and he sets himself into the plush of the nearest empty booth, discomfort with touching anything around him so conspicuous it might as well be flashing red and blue, Naegi thinks. He says only, "Alright," and swivels at the hips to claim steps going. "Just letting you know, though, that table's not in my section."

The walk continues, tending to the check a pair of round eyed tourists had left aside a stack of dishes dripping in marinara. He dips into the kitchen, returned before the door finishes its sway with a round dishware tray. Behind the mess sits a new one, tall and blond and covering his mouth and nose in a palm, expression a burning house. Fist to hip, Naegi tuts with a tilt of the head.


	5. Chapter 5

He hates that he remembers.

The list doesn't stop there, oh by far, but it's at the forefront this moment, those dragging behind and demanding to follow. The part that one points to and says,  _right here, doctor, scrape it clean._ The idea of a lobotomy shouldn't make his mouth water as it so does, yet he cannot picture a better proceeding step once he's clicked to confirm five thousand extra yen spent on next day delivery.

_If you smush that cake in my face, Togami Byakuya, I swear-_

_Ah, but it's tradition, Togami Makoto-_

His office is a shadow eating itself raw, blue reflections tracing the shallow pits beneath either eye. The computer screen dies off at the tapping of a finger, leaves him sans its whir, dead silence as the most abhorrent backtrack to throbbing temples. He rests the dull ache in a palm.

There's just no way.

He'd acquired a new stalker at Superwash, that's it.

_-enty four...twenty five...twenty six. And, mhmh, one for good lu-_

Four AM has never once done him good. He deserves more than anything to meld with the crisp satin of bedsheets now, to envelop his pristine flesh in fabric a close challenge. Nothing in his personal recorded dogmas spills a pinch about ordering fruit baskets with personalized messages for the freak who'd followed him from the laundromat. He decides to attribute the issue in her entirety to the idiot repairman, and he'll call tomorrow to have whomever answered the first phone at Souda & Son's fired just in time for the Christmas season.

Perhaps he should have coffee.

But- and here goes the part where he growls tightly at the dormant monitor's reflection -it's late, he's tired, and he'd spent already ten minutes bantering with the operator and get the address listed for one Naegi Makoto (because he doesn't  _care_ that it's the twenty-first century and they don't do that anymore, he's Togami Byakuya and he owns the fucking world), and he's  _tired._

_Nooo, Byakuyaaa, it's salt, then shot, then lime-_

Sleep could not bribe him into bed right now.

They'd married, divorced, and both come down with amnesia after falls on ski trips, that's it.

Amnesia that rid from their memories nothing but that of each other- he's yet to see it in any medicine journal, but neither had Jenner before the milkmaids tumbled into him with blisters itching. There is a first time for all things, first date (at the highest praised French restaurant on all of Honshu), first kiss (in his Mercedes an hour later), first fuck (in his Mercedes three minutes later).

The carafe is catching drips in a minute's breath.

All that shit about, what, divine intervention? Whomever thought that up truly deserves the lobotomy, not himself, though all the same he wonders straight into his third cup of creamless brew how he'd known the gate passcode.

The mug's sitting, black sleek and half full, on the countertop above him when his eyes next attempt focus.

But the last thing to be  _above_ him had its legs chopped at the knees, so he's certain there's been a glitch in the simulation of reality around him. Another blink to reset it, and still he sees mist stuffing his mouth in rags, and he feels vaguely like he's been split down his axial center, since one cheek's sore in its chill and only half his eyes are functioning as normal. It's the glitch, he knows, not at all that he's slumped on his kitchen tile, glasses sideways on his face and thighs kissing air.

He rises with a hand gripping the counter, the other rubbing his face to that, that- whatever,  _priestliness_. The glazed look that mirrors back at him in the carafe chokes him in irony's five fingers.

College boozehounds and their pixy stick cheerleader harlots can last the night and day without a lick of sleep, not he who requires perfection incomparable to move each a finger even, that's it.

It's dark still, anyhow. A twenty minute power nap is all he's needed to feel the surge of a dozen nights slept-  _ha!_ A king he is over his domain. Glasses adjust straight, hair following in the glass reflection behind the stove burners. Vibrant green parts his face, cuts through the early morning murk to shout five:fifty-seven.

Two hours is not so much more than twenty minutes as to consider him an error. A glance out the grand over-the-sink window catches him a mildly obscured view to the sunrise, rinsing his cup whilst admiring the weather's ability to snow half a foot in so quick a measure- had it even been snowing when he'd fallen asleep? The forecast hadn't said it would until noon. He'd been right to dismiss meteorology as pure voodoo.

_-ook at him, Byakuya. His first time seeing snow, oh this is just too adorab-_

Breakfast. He needs breakfast.

Driving in such conditions would intimidate the cheerleaders and the Schnapp guzzlers, but never would he fear his own dominion. Despise her, perhaps so, as he'd been sure his lane would be clear while the other fights against rush hour pre-work traffic. Rather he's trapped between a hundred miles of minivans and American Fords, a mix of last minute storm preparers and those commuting to the city's hotel chains. It grows insipid in a flick, and he decides no further time shall be squandered sitting in traffic wasting three days worth of gas. He nearly rear ends the  _I RAISED A MARINE_ bumper sticker in his lurch forward at the opening of his phone. The half hour spent primping and the full one stopping every ten feet- that could be enough time to accumulate two hundred ten business emails and a mouthful of missed calls. A horn beeps behind him; he presses his lenses into place, drops the device to the center console, and guns it down a dingy side street. Anything to break away from the gum-stuck fast lane.

Anything, though he thinks this corner of the city owes him an apology for making him look at it. It doesn't represent his home in the slightest. To him it looks less Tokyo and more inner city squalor round the rim of Yokohama. It's-

A wonderful idea, and he stands on the gas pedal into tires yelping. He's arrived in what feels a quarter's time, heart bursting with the adrenaline of a quick hard fuck, his only bitch the open road and she'd bid only  _yes yes yes!_  Apartments pass a blur to his sides, the ice beneath him casting him thrice the speed. One stinks vaguely of fresh fruit and phone bills a month late, he imagines on his way past. He trades in fantasy for attentive eyes on the waning street's edge, slows to a walker's pace in his search.

_For what-_ he cannot place the kind of person who works from college to perceived adulthood at the same hole in the wall.

A Naegi Makoto type person, if the little rat darting this way and that through his view of the long windows from his curbside park is true to form.

"Were you a stalker in a past life?"  _Oh, raucous, raucous applause!_ An eyeroll isn't even deserved; he remains solid in stoic, peers across the rows of booths. The place could use a manicure.

"I'm here to have breakfast, not to speak with you." Excellent. He's far too suave for his own good, with such a line and such a life he leads, and he only switches table because the heat vent's right beneath this one. Whatever his waiter's said to him, if anything at all, whatever, had no impact on the decision, only that his feet sweating in Versaces ruins the lining. Though the new spot's hardly an improvement. Dishes clutter the table. A splash of cola serves as the coaster to a cup of ice. Behind him, some feverish mongrel coughs, to which on instinct does his own hand play a nurse's mask. Dis _gusting._

"So, breakfast at eight PM?" A pen click drags his attention sideways. "What can I get you?"

The knot to his tie chokes him, pencil thin brows guiding his lids to contract a second's fraction.

Thirteen hours is not so much more than twenty minutes.

"Coffee," he chooses. "Bl-"

"Black with two sugars," Naegi says. "Coming right up."

His lips purse insolently. Coming here not to speak with him has so far proved successful; hardly can he get a word in when the other's particularly indefatigable. He's always found it irritating beside the softest hints of endearing. Though,  _always_ is a strong pinch about the bounds of a day sole-

The space before him is cleared and wiped in record timing, continues Guinnessly with his return from the back so quickly it makes him question the age of the beverage he's served. But it's hot and he's so in need of a shower he could kill himself twice over, which means caffeine is the next best option.

"You don't go to diners." He's pinned by the stare across from him, knelt into the cushion as his hawk's perch.

He refuses to play mouse. "Another of your spiritually awoken  _memories_ of me?" The coffee mug kisses him in a close of his eyes. It's revolting, perfect to the way he takes it.

Though he keeps dammed his gaze, he can  _feel_ the way Naegi's still leering at him- it's impossible not to. "No," he says. "I've just never seen anyone drive here in a Lambo."

Lake frost cracks to let freed a thin glare, stubborn in its unwillingness to bear obvious contempt. Togami does not accept  _touches_ , but he's trying to drink his motherfucking coffee and Naegi needs to take a night class in shutting his damn mouth.

"Why are you still mocking me? You feel it too, I  _know_  you do."

"The only thing I  _feel_ is feel like getting you fired for pestering customers," rings in a raise of voice.

Naegi drops his leg from its rest beneath him, stands tall at the table's side with pen and notes poised. His wax museum display should appease enough the ranked up passerby, and he's sure to keep private the dark glower knotting his doll face. Shrewd.

" _Togami_ ," his teeth say clenched, "I hate eating fruit."

"Wonderful, thank you for sharing." To his folded lap, he places the lamination of a menu unfurled to it. He skims it idly, thinks not of which bread he'd take on a croque-madame but fantasizes over the hand sanitizing alcohol in his glove compartment. His poker face trembles under the crushing heel of a grimace.

The other's presence is nearly forgotten until breath beats delicate at his ear, "I know you sent it. I know you remember me.  _Please-_ "

"Is there a manager I could speak to?" he very practically yells over their shoulders. "I'm feeling quite violated."

A handful of looks toss toward them, and now it is instead a smirk he's to swallow back, because despite it he's gotten what he'd set out for; Naegi draws back in a jump, purses his mouth to an aching tightness and turns a hellfire the other way. A twin to his own rhetoric, the packed restaurant gets the surround sound of the conversation he tosses with the hang of his apron on a hook. "Andou, could you cover for me? I'm going on break. There's a rude prick at table eleven."

He watches the leave take place, arms stuffed violent to coat sleeves, bell jangling a mess of clatters.

"What can I get for you, sir?" the perky pair of tits next to him asks.

Peeled is his focus from the clear glass of the front door. He blinks upward, realizes she has a face and that its smiling at him in a wilted sunflower kind of way. The type to spit in your macchiato and call it froth.

Wordless, he drops a five thousand note on the table, and pushes past her ogling.

"Makoto."

The blizzard's gained hot traction, closing them in stark opposite. His knuckles are a painful scarlet at his sides. The other, the subject to the predicate he cannot yet dare, leans in languid presses gainst the shadowed side to the cafe, attenuated in his stare toward the dwindle of cars passing. Himself- he stays a broad step gone, cautious, abiding.

The name goes ownerless. There's a pull in him, the urge to crush forward unto the layers of winter caking in his boot bottoms. His lips narrow; it'd be a fool's move to at all claim it. Naegi stays frozen as the heavy banks along the sidewalk, stays silent in his own form of mystery Togami is chomping at every bit to unravel, yet all the same believes (a foreign taste) it to be already too much so to be mended. Why he'd come at all, why he'd come at all-

Flecks of snow drift lightened to their sunder.

"You have a birthmark on your ankle," he says, like some absolute idiot, standing in below zero with the love of his life he's never met. "You...You like rainbow sherbet because it's  _cute,_ but you only eat the green part. You don't like the other flavors, you get it because it's  _cute-_ how stupid is that?" His arms toss in a scoff, fold with eyes long toward the road. "You failed English freshman year. You sing in the shower-  _loud_  and off key. Songs from those air-headed skimpy-skirted idols you can't get enough of. You won't quit working at this shit hole of a restaurant because we  _met here,_ so it must be  _lucky."_ Before his mouth huffs thickness to disrupt the air, and there's observation upon him when he turns his gaze back straight, quiet and fever-faced.

"...My car broke down outside, and it was fucking  _freezing,_ and I went in there and I took a seat and you got idiotically peppy over it. You told me I was your first customer and I told you I didn't give a damn." Mortification streams from crown to arch. Lungs scorch to the beat of vulnerability. "But I tipped you,  _handsomely_ , because I  _felt badly,_ Makoto, I felt badly for being rude to such a personable little wretch. So...go fuck yourself for making me feel, and for making me go back and have horrendous coffee and sandwiches every afternoon just to see you again, you Goddamned  _dumbass."_

Drips patter to the sidewalk from the gutter lip icicles. A circle lines where its caught those drips enough times to expose concrete beneath it, a separation from blank sheets of white marred in prints of travel. He's staring at it, in a catch of his breath and relinquish of color he swears the temperature slapped to his throat. He's staring at it, until a toe tip takes the next splash, minuscule to her surrounding world. Boot to jeans to walk up zipper's teeth, and he at last allows the clap of eyes to clash once he's examined every bit of his face.

Naegi's lips are flush, hands stuffed into pocket lining. His chin tilts leftways.

_-in sickness and in health, to love and to ch-_

"You talk too much, baby."

They reach, they lean, it's hot it's magic, and there's stripes on his socks and stars in his eyes, gripping choking, cat fur fallen, and neither remember to forget or know the letters to their names, and what's in a name what's in a name that which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet; Makoto's a rose Makoto is his rose and his kiss is cheap soap and a morning on the beach, a thousand nights rains that hold him at the ankle and dip him in the styx.

Maybe there's some way. With the time to understand it, there's a way.

His fingers ache in their frost as the sun drops behind them.


	6. Chapter 6

A humming vibrates to the flesh of his mouth.

It's some Billboard hit from overseas that hasn't left his head for a week. Roughly twenty percent of the words can be pieced together to make some semblance of sense to him, the rest leaving him to hum and bop along as he cruises unto the vast lot's welcoming tongue. His fingers tap against the door's outside, thick air tosses his hair to waves through the open window. He's a close dirty blond with the sunlight filtering so through it.

Someday he'll have a convertible to glide through expensive hotel gates, but he's saving right now is all; and he'll tip his Prada shades and pucker his grin, and the light will part in his presence because he's Naegi Makoto, stardust fallen to Earth just to become atoms.

Someday he won't have to twist the steering wheel in such distaste toward the staff parking lot behind the Sapporo Four Seasons.

Today is not that day.

"Good morning, Naegi," his coworker greets when he steps into their ground floor quarters. She's peering in a compact set to the rickety oak table along one wall, pulling an overwhelming bundle of hair back into a lace tie. "Taking the thirty-second floor today?"

"Morning, Yukizome," he says, nosing his way to share the reflection and straighten his uniform top, tucks the bangle at his wrist further into his sleeve, then nods. Two hands grip the handle of push supply cart behind them, and he waves to her on his stroll out. The elevator is empty by the grace of ten Gods, though it's rare to see boarders up and about at this time; his shift begins just after the six AM rush of businessmen with their coffees and briefcases and ties, just before the yelps of a dozen grade schoolers buzzing by to reach the downstairs breakfast buffet.

The ride is a long stretch of minutes. He pats a palm to his thigh in faultless tune.

_19...20...21..._

" _Mmmhmmhmhmhu..._ miss your kiss... _hmmhn_ oh, love me nooow..."

A sharp ding is his doorman to the carpets outside. Plant fronds sway against his cart on its push forward down the long hall, one he's yet to take without the touch of a shiver up his nape. Thirty two stories in the open air. Heights have never been so a gentle lover as solid ground has. He doesn't envy Toujou and her normal route of thirty three to thirty six, though something in him is sure she'd select them still aside an option.

Wind howls at the closest window, dips of neon from the cross the street laundromat lingering still in the mild morning. He tugs a finger at the high collar of his shirt, moves it next to rest aside its three brothers and rap on the door to his right.

"Housekeeping?"

No response. Jackpot.

He swipes the skeleton key card through the slot and nudges his way inside. An alluring sight- the sheets are stripped (and  _viscous,_ upon closer nose wrinkling inspection), towels left slung over the bathroom counter in a slow drip to the tile below. He tears the shower curtain open to a rat's nest of dark hair in the drain catch. Sooner would he lose last night's leftovers across the porcelain than lay touch to it bare, but the bristles of the toothbrush left wet on the counter top do wonders in hooking it out.

" _Bleh,"_ lolls tongue from mouth in its thick drop into the wastebasket.

Twenty clicks go along the analog face as he works, compiling linens to stuff into the cart's hamper, towels and cloths topping it heavy. The swish of a fresh sheet is music. Blanket goes atop it, pillows fluffed, bathroom scrubbed. He parts the curtains to permit a vamp's curse in, fresh and vitalizing against the smell of soft laundry soap.

The door latches to the flick of a hip.

" _Mmhmh_ , oh  _ohhhoh_ , baby baby... _mhmmmnhmmm_...Housekeeping?"

Each room he takes is a more whirlwinded disaster than its prior. By his sixth, the sun has peaked to the sky's very crest.

"Housekeeping," he says in time to pushing the door opened. An pair of twisted boxer shorts lay on the window sill. He tips his head in a slow inhale- in through the nose, out through the mouth. One to ten.

Eleven hundred yen an hour is worth the grime beneath his nails and the ache behind his eyes. Plus tip, which he gladly snatches from the round table beside the exit on his way out again. A pair of silver coins. Cheap spring break bastards.

He yanks the knob on his way, disgust folding his mouth to the grease it leaves as a parting gift. Filthy spring break bastards.

Palms go to brushing over his lap, tugging the key card up again. Swipe, twist, push, half a second not wasted.

"Housek-"

Thinking on how deeply he'd like to throttle each messy client melts to liquid in his hands that once more freeze into surprise. Every fraction of space is taken up by its appropriate bearings, ironed curtains kissing, bottles lined neat and prim, not a single thread of the thousand count sheets out of place. Between them- well, he's in his place, likewise, sitting straightbacked to the headboard and against it bare skin chilling.

"Oh!" A bow goes forward, more to hide the shamed flush taking his complexion than penitence on its own. "I'm sorry, I didn't know anyone was in here, I'll come back-"

The duvet at the renter's waist shifts, up springing the head of a second, hair tousled above heat pink cheeks and lips' cosmetic smudged, like the season's prime daisy. Naegi blinks once, choking on the view of either man with dartboard stares ensnaring him.

"I'll...come back later."

Click.

Mouth a low slunk cat, his throbbing heart pushes him to a lean on the wall. Half year's jaunt at the gig- he's been exposed to a variety that match this flavor, each in its own way a unique disturbance. Walking in mid-blow job does not leave him so pleased as the nude molly-headed woman with time to kill and an inviting smile, he must admit. Though, he's written in the feeble disappoint that meets no invitation now. He shakes his head, wills the heat from his core and trudges onward.

His shift carries him into a relent round the hands five split. He'd hang a man for a shower, but the sense in driving an hour home rings zero, so he sits in his car as he always does, relishes in the freedom to take a breath that doesn't choke him in a chemical stench. Fingers stroke the screen of newsfeed on his phone screen, the others idling in a bag at the center console. He swallows; another vending machine cookie goes to fill the emptied place on his tongue.

"Love me now, baby baby, oh... _hmhmhmhhhh..."_

Sharp taps on his window send the bite into a gasping choke.

His phone skitters from his startled hand to between his feet, sharing glances to the sun-obstructed knuckle bearer beside his window, and he's grateful his paranoia had convinced him to roll it up after parking. He collects himself from the wind stolen in coughs, sits a bolt rightways to dart pinpricks outside. Dares he the faintest press on the down arrow.

"Um...hello?" His eyes peek out the allowed crack at the top, wincing in the midday gleams.

The stranger fixes him in a pinch faced glower. "How much?"

Vaguely a trance takes him in examination, decides in an instinctive move that hatchet wielders don't wear Armani and prescription lenses. Blink. "Uhh, excuse me?"

He watches in strict, strict staring the motion of the stranger's hands as they reach to his jacket's interior. Naegi fumbles for the up arrow, and wonders if his insurance covers bullet shattered windows, but he's never seen a pistol made of genuine leather or bear a row of silver debit cards, which relaxes him just slightly.

"How much to keep you quiet?" Staid ocean tides flit through the pocket of the wallet in his hold. "One hundred thousand? Five hundred?"

"Huh?"

The stranger shoves a sigh from his lips, rolls those tides to swallowing waves. "You'd think for all their revenue they could hire maids from this country.  _Money? L'argent? Dinero? Geld?"_

"Oh," bids he suddenly, flush burning the cells of his face anew. "You're the...guy from the room."

He wonders if it hurts to swivel one's eyes in such force to such frequency. "Stop wasting my time. I'm being generous by not popping a cap betwixt your eyes for invading my private sectors. Now take it, I'm sick of looking at you."

Several banknotes are forced through the slip at the window's top. They fall to his lap in a rain. He's a mess of scrambling to catch the steps clacking opposite.

"Wait!" The car door pushes open, narrowly missing scraping the SUV beside it. He hasn't the time to bother worrying over it, looking up instead to the one he's captured in a turn around. "I don't want money- I won't tell anyone about...what I saw, I promise."

" _Please_ ," the other snaps before he's even the time to collect his breath. "It's always money with you people. Oh, the local worldwide celebrity has homoerotic love affairs in hotel rooms. The tabloids will just  _eat up_ that information."

_You people._ It sits less than fondly at his tonsils. "Well," the handful of bills outstretch to him, "I don't know any worldwide celebrities here, so whoever you were with is safe."

"Very  _funny_ ," he spits as venom. Naegi's never listened to a speaker with such violent emphasis. "Go ahead and make a fool of me as you please, I can assure you I'll be the one to have  _le dernier rire."_

He twists haughty and goes on his way; an ache finds its way into his stupidly good samaritan heart. His break ends early with a quick reach for his phone, quick latch of the driver door, quick everything as he darts after toward the browbeating building.

"Here, take your money back, I won't-"

"If you say one more word to me from that filthy commoner mouth of yours," his threat begins, makes its recipient flinch. They pause in the lot's midst, centerfolds to a demon's neath-the-bed shoebox. The other, the tall and richy rich too good for you other, faces him to fix accusation's harsh point. "I'll be liable to mount your head above my mantel."

Something within him warns him against  _I bet I wouldn't be the first guy you've mounted-_ He makes note to thank it later, but for now pushes forward that insistent fistful of cash. "I can't accept this. Please."

The knuckles at his hip go a shocking white. When they uncurl to whip again to that inner pocket, he thinks he'd better duck should he like to keep a skull between his ears. But- again -it's that thick fold of leather, which he takes to in reckless abandon of gripping bills and tossing them forward.

"You think I care about a few thousand yen?" A cold laugh would leave him, Naegi believes, were it not for the seething red to the peaks of his visage now. Handfuls of banknotes fly about them. He'd laugh, too, envisioning those wind tunnel machines people go wild over at the arcade, were he not caught within the fork tongs of shock. "Take a  _plethora,_ for all I care. None of it matters- I could spend my mornings panning for cupronickel and still be so far above you that the Voyager 1 couldn't detect me."

Naegi wonders what cupronickel is. Naegi wonders what the Voyager 1 is.

Naegi wonders how someone can think of these things off the top of their head.

It's almost impressive.

Distracted is he so by the soliloquy that he ignores the performance in her gorgeously manic entirety. A final mess of bills rain to the asphalt atop the others, leaves the stranger in a fit of dark eyes and tight teeth as he peers down at him. Meeting that stare's in the same ballpark as perusing the menu for a last meal; he drops his eyes' quiver to the ground, rather, watching the breeze taunt the corners of receipts and slips fallen in his final act upturning the wallet to enunciate its desolation.

In a mind corner, he thinks he should have kept the hundred grand and bought those Prada sunglasses.

The wind forces a down payment on a house across the parking lot. A squared slip tumbles by him, and he leans to pick it up, nails skipping against the pavement several notches before he lifts it to his full height. The name and digits scrawled over it mean nothing to him, though he hadn't wanted this rude and more than likely clinical stranger to lose an appointment to the tossing breeze. He nearly smiles- the handwriting looks a twin to his own scratchy loops.

"Here, you dropped-," Naegi attempts to tell him, the fire at which it is snatched a startle to him. "...this."

"Do not touch my things." The stranger seems close to a touched flame at either cheekbone as he glances down at the note, stuffs it in haste to a hip pocket. Double takes press his face side to side, a preceding fever to his stiff legged chase of nothing back through the revolving doors five meters off.

He still doesn't know what cupronickel is.


	7. Chapter 7

For its thumbprint of a smudge on the world's map, Hokkaido is a devastating maze he hates to have to fathom.

The plane had stalled (and he'd dared it in a flash of eyes dour to go down) and traded his scheduled eight AM arrival for an hour past, wrings the rest of his day in God's strained fists to drip out all its enjoyment. Checking into his desired hotel room is not so much a nightmare as the morning's flail swung, and he snatches his key and lets thirty two flights kiss his soles for the next ten minutes.

He swipes his key and kicks in the door to room 341 at a quarter past nine. The blank slip left for key cards takes its repast with a blockade; stuffing it in aside growls does him no good, and to a slam of the door he picks a spindle finger into the slot to retrieve it. A crushed corner of notebook paper is yanked from its rest.

His lips purse deeper against their frown. He's no clue the point main of his address scrawled over it, ones he's clearly written though decided somewhere along the line to toss from his memory. Odd is the note above it-  _Togami Byakuya,_ yes that's him, the golden God of all inferior,  _your husband_ , no- backtrack.

Zero percent sense, yet he finds the paper warm to his touch.

He tucks it aside the broad sea of bills, tucks the key card to its slot, tucks the burner phone from his pocket to his hand.

It's an intense amount of effort for a quick fuck, but he finds himself insatiable too often to placate.

The low cut coquette knocks on his door not a half hour later, to which he's a whip of door to answer and command his entrance before the foam of his coffee's dissipated from his top lip. Vague does a lick go to it, to which his rented property bows mildly in an introduction.

"I don't care," is his response, only a touch off putting to the other. "Just suck my cock."

He's bared himself to raw, set himself neath covers exquisite. Thus far this cheap stranger's proved noxious, meeting no standards to perfection; he's on the side of minuscule in personality, a mouse to the world around him. Strands of sunkissed blond to match his glowing flesh, soft to his curl of fingers within. Though he's to meet a glance upward at him in disgust, force them shut by a palm to forehead. Brown isn't right. Nothing is right.

Midway through the rendezvous below the sheets, he has half the mind to nix the act all together; it's brought him nowhere slowly, fallen to softness in the wet of mouth. Nothing is right, the bob of lips nor flick of tongue. The rouge stains he'd paid extra for do null to thrill him.

An exhale leaves him. He'll have to try again in another month.

Then he's good for ruin in the click to the door.

"House-," he hears, the marionette string that yanks his vision toward it.

His throat takes the throb of heart.

"Oh!" And this mousy little intruder bows, red in the face as wreath bows, blubbering word vomit in an apology. There's a shifting where his attention has strayed, and he adds a meter to the list of complaints about his  _guest:_ doesn't stay under the fucking blanket.

"I'll come back later," is the excuse that draws the door to a snap shut, wraps them in a cavern of chilled lone.

A situation one swallows to the hesitance of speech; he rests in the purgatory of uncertainty to lilt, to address or not the issue, to address or not that his  _energy's_  been restored and like hell he'd waste a one hour session now. The other asks it, rather, not in the sweet croons of timidity he's wanted but rasps that meet him none to saccharine. He peers down to him. The comforter flies to bare them both, and he's shoved into the hall with a fistful of bills and weakness in each knee.

To the bed's corners, Egyptian cotton tucks from hands unsteadied. His perch is nearest the window, a chair metal neath his crossed legs, taken now to lengths of fine slacks to match their jacket.

And he waits.

It's three hours of calming himself over two servings more of dark brew. The view of the stilled parking lot adopts a waltzing ant thirty two stories descended- prey.

Really, he isn't surprised he drives a shitty little Corolla. Around them the air stands silent, squeezes his chest into an ache at the dull humming gown louder in his approach. Something stalls his knuckles once they raise high. Something stings.

The show of pure fear put on by his quarry dabs the wound's blood clotted full.

He's a rush to pressurize the hundred that splatter cross his skin once the discussion has gone lost.

Only behind clasped doors would he even think of admitting he'd left behind a touch too much drama. He has no idea what he's dropped in trade for nothing more, doesn't care to think on it nor think to care on it. Money's no object- the physical, palpable dregs of his day rest in his palm, seated to bed's edge and staring at it.

The note means nothing to him, truly,  _truly,_ though it's found its way to him twice this young day alone.  _Togami Byakuya- your husband._ Its manuscript is unrecognizable (nearly unintelligible too, he sneers in contempt) and likewise birthed on every holiday card ever sent by his name, every shopping list, every  _love you_ scrawled through his mirror's shower fog.

But hardly should he be so concerned with a scrap of notebook paper when he's bound for demolition by the fan of five knuckles. Five stupid knuckles he'd give all to crush underneath his boot.

He'll do them a metaphorical better, and once he's satisfied in the shredding of that scrap sans any meaning true or dear, it is the stairs that glide him, the front desk that endures his presence.

"Checking out, sir?" questions the woman sat behind it. She'd tended to him this morning in his haste, made an air headed humor about his lack of luggage. He'd spat back something about a business conference, snatched his card and fled. That card spanks down to hard oak now, prompting her plastic smile in her turn toward him. Years worth of typing guide her muscles to routine in seconds flat, and she's nodded to him and offers forward rhetorical politeness. "I hope you enjoyed your stay."

"Nowhere near  _enjoyed,"_ he answers, perking her eyes in a way that tells she rarely receives one.

A manicured hand scans toward papers stacks below the desk's upper lip. One sheet is exchanged in a yank. "We'd love to hear your feedback and learn how we can improve to cater to you better next time."

 _CUSTOMER SATISFACTION FORM_  beats his core from the page's top. He scoffs in a heave forward. "Where's the form I fill out to fire your incompetent, discourteous, slovenly employees?"

"Um." Her plump lip goes to a bite. "We'd...love to hear your feedback on our customer satisfaction form-"

The drivel dies to an ombre's pale in his focus caught sideways. Swaying goes hips from direction behind him to passing, and he's still swiping crumbs from his palm when a sharp yell catches him. Togami revels in the pale that sweeps his complexion dulled in the throb of anxiety. Shadowed in that superiority breathes he, beckoned.

He turns again to face the woman at the desk, short and wide-hipped and dressed in a uniform of discomforted puzzle. "This employee of yours has harassed me endlessly today-"

" _Harassed_ you?!" spits he in a boldness that startles them all three alike. "...I mean, I didn't- I-I-" A wave takes his mouth, draws expression pinched. _"You're_ the one who threw money all over me!"

The attendant blinks.

Togami's arms fold. "How mature of you, ping-ponging blame back unto its courier. Don't fret, little one, surely there's plenty of other places that'll let you scrub shit stains for minimum wage besides this one."

"Ah, that reminds me," breaks the coup. Together they melt from thunder a moment to watch her fingers flitting through papers all sorts. A slip presses to the counter, to which mouth takes water in delight. "For you, Naegi. Munakata had to leave early, so he left the paychecks with me."

His smile toward her is a line of courtesy, softness. He takes the pen offered his way in the same tune.

"And would you send Yukizome and Toujou here if you see them?" she says, to which he nods in a sweet  _mhm!_ and flips the check to scrawl upon its back.

Palms slap the hardwood.

"Is it  _so_  much to ask that you don't interrupt me with your business affairs that pertain  _nothing_ to the issue at hand." The narrow slice to his eyes draws blood from them both in a single glance. "You behave as though my value as a denizen here is null, though I have now  _no_ intention of returning, not with-"

Plasma drips from a sapphire's corner in his look to the ink's quelled spout. Pressed in loops that avoid neatness as though viral, a thin penned signature left neath the exchange back of the utensil used to birth it. In a tiger claw forward, the check snatches to him, a fishing hook through the other's shouted  _hey-!_

Throat pulled tight, he examines it. That plasma turns now tides, the stinging salt that whisks men from their ships, widowers to weep themselves in mirror's echo. Holiday cards shopping lists  _love you_ s Tanabata wishes given to the stars alone footnotes essays notes on the fridge when he'd just wanted a glass of skim milk that say  _hi baby went to the bookstore in the center to get Komaru that new manga she wanted for her birthday, will probably pick up something for dinner so don't (arrow) cont. on back-_

"Can I have my check back, please?" is his very own fishing hook, and when he again looks up after whoever should know how long, it is to crumble sans his trying that pissy little puff-cheeked expression (like he does when his gacha games prove him luckless like he does when his jeans are just  _that_ much too taut once each month like he'd put on at the theater that time when the delinquent behind them shouted  _HAN DIES_ whilst the opening credits still rolled) in the wake of one golden in her sympatheticness. "Oh- hey...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you upset. Really, I'm sorry."

He hasn't been upset a day in his life in the sense this stranger lilts. Not in the way paved for apology, for gentle touches and eyes hush the same, with his own gleaming in the late afternoon light of billion dollar baby chandeliers dangling over them. Fingers casts over his contour burned carmine. By any means he is not  _crying? is that even how it's pronounced?_ He wouldn't know, he's never been so stripped of worth to experience the feeling (but knows it just as close from seeing, for the first time held had been the warmth of Gingersnaps and all her newborn mewls and fluff, and all the same when tires had rendered her an asphalt pancake and he'd spent a week straight mourning a stupid cat and Togami had held him close each night regardless with a hand soft along his back and complaining not to the drench of his chest's front- then, and every alternate day when emotion should take his heart too strong, sure, he'd experienced, so he knows what crying  _is,_ but not how it feels to be wet at the lashes in front of two strangers and the impatient queue behind him likewise).

Speech does not tempt his lips. Rather he takes to a wrist's flick swift, seconds parting them in a weight that screams  _well? take it!_ in more haughty glory than should ever be attempted by a man who's just cried in front of two strangers because of a signature on a paycheck.

"Um," one tries now, "I...I hope you enjoyed your stay, sir."

The paper is stolen timidly from him, where he allows his hand to drop to empty air and flee in distinguished haste back to the summer air through his roots.  _CUSTOMER SATISFACTION FORM_ stares up at them from the counter's dark top.


	8. Chapter 8

"I just...don't understand it."

Around him, the living room is a languid dark. The curtains are drawn behind his spot slumped to the sofa cushions, warm palms taking the fleeting melt of candy before the strawberry-chocolates drop into his mouth, chewing a rhythm to his further thought. Freed of the stick by a swipe to his lounge pants, the same hand collides to rest below his bangs. "He built a  _house_ for you, Allie- a white house with blue shutters and a room overlooking the river so you can paint!  _Kiss_ him already."

The theater box of Meijis passes to the one at the second spot aside him, ankles crossed lazy and hair tied loose beneath a seasonally abysmal wool cap of gaudy argyle. Comfort. "Call me a clairvoyant, but I think she's about to." She reaches to collect a handful of candy.

"Wait, it has to rain first," he tells her. His fingers touch in absence along his bracelet's charms. He blinks to himself. "I mean, maybe it's going to rain, I don't know."

It's a pure act, they know alike, and it's the twin to the preceding seven times they've viewed this film in tandem, matching too, his adamance when intaking any media fresh not to him; treat everything as a day of new's brand. She thinks him more quirky than mankind's ever to know, yet finds each an amendment to his flavorful constitution of a core. Lovely, lovely.

Rain pours over the characters set in the scene before them. He turns his head to her, trashy romance reflecting in the wide of each iris, mouth a circle in faux awe he can hardly contain the wiggling grin to. Strawberry crunches beyond her mouth's closed door.

Friday nights are spend a handful of the week's pay on snacks and stream a two star poorly dubbed western movie night (not officially, but she cannot recall the last time the flick had been of her choice, as she's rather passive in the face of her one truest adoration's joy, and her one truest adoration adores two star poorly dubbed western movies like  _Kimi ni Yomu Monogatari_ ). He reaches forward for a half moon cookie. It snaps behind his top teeth.

"Did he write her, though?" wonders she aloud, one hand supporting her head with the other resting at her abdomen.

Beside her, he takes on a syncing to the film's flowing transcript;  _I wrote you three hundred sixty five letters,_ moves against his silent lips in time to the handsome strong jawed actor,  _I wrote you everyday for a year._

The interlude to their lip lock, the roaring splice of music and artificial rainstorm, leaves him reeling in bunched fists, smile glimmering to success' sound. Hardly do her tendons twitch.

"What happened today?" wonders she flatly, once he's taken a breath from his eighth awestruck celebration to lean forward and claim his drink. A new position takes him, sipping idly the root beer up its straw with heels rested to the other's lap.

"What d'you mean?" His jaw cocks, and he's careful to hold back the bite his lip wishes to take on, but he thinks she'd see it even without it existing. To his fret further, he grips the sudden realizing of having been fiddling so clear with the bracelet at his wrist, something she'd pointed out to him long since to be a quote unquote anxious habit.

Conversations with a psychoanalyst are a traipse through a field strewn in mines.

Notice does he the way she  _notices,_ and his palms breathe a wetness without need of his cup's condensation. "The last time you chose this movie was after someone spoiled Star Wars for you. The time before that, you'd spent half your Christmas money on that idol game you play and hadn't gotten anything you like out of it. The time-"

"Okay," pauses her. He sets his drink to the coffee table anew. The television glows blinding into his apartment's dull pitch. "Well...okay, I don't even really... _know._ A lot, I guess. Umm..."

It isn't so plainly that he hasn't wanted to tell his very dearest best friend about his day, it's this wall he's trailed into now, of what led to which and who did how, above all  _why-_ but he's got the where, so he begins, "At work," and wrings his hands to place the rest. "At work...I think I made some guy cry."

Her eyebrows take on a mild perking, the lilacs beneath them staying calm and indolent as they glance about his jester's frame.

"Well...okay, I don't know-" A shake runs through his head. "He was kind of a jerk, or maybe just in a bad mood 'cause I saw his dick, but- no, okay, don't give me that look, it wasn't on purpose." His breath outward extinguishes  _that look_ , and he goes on more settled, "I walked in on him  _with someone,_ 'cause I was gonna clean the room and stuff, y'know, my job, but anyway, he found me in the parking lot, and wanted to buy my silence or whatever. Then he found me again later in the lobby, tried to get me fired, and cried when I told him to give me my check back- 'cause he just,  _picked it up!_ like we were friends or something. I mean, I wouldn't mind being his friend if he'd asked before going all nuts on me. But...I dunno." The last comes out in another sigh's length; "Weird day."

The licorice twist she'd adopted during the stage play is munched on quietly, residue sticky to the pads of her bared fingers.

"It seems like you've found your soulmate."

His throat bellows a coughing, switches into amusement to the snap of teeth wide. "Oh, yeah. This guy was a real Noah Calhoun."

"Perhaps he's more so your house with blue shutters," she says, to which he wrinkles his nose and carries on watching, carries on surprised as tulips wilt through winter.

It's the crushing of wrappers and the unhinging of joints rusted over when the credits draw some time later, chest hollowed to expose his prattling to light. The television hushes in a click, and she's bent at the waist scavenging crumbs from the carpet as he stretches tall into a yawn. Friday nights, too, are sleepover nights, not because she particularly likes the crick in her neck on Saturday mornings from his thousand yen queen mattress, or because it's just so fun to spend eight hours slapping his cheek for snoring her into a migraine- companionship proves itself a wonder she cannot unfurl so fully, is the final decision on their trail for his bedroom.

"Night, Kyouko," comes long after they've palavered an hour gone, eyes to the ceiling like constellations to name. Her chest draws up once in a breath before turning to face outward.

Then it is he alone with the white night sky above him, fan blades whirring quiet aside their jangling pull chain in its midst. He sighs heavy, head heavy heart heavy and all else, taps fingers to the blanket lain up to sternum. Weird day. It's a mantra.

It had begun normal; he'd awoken and he's stretched and he'd popped his neck back into alignment, he'd eaten his cereal and brushed the marshmallow from his molars, driven to work, folded sheets and scrubbed tile, wiped the sweat from his brow to the antibacterial musk of a job well done. If do not disturb signs were properly utilized, he'd have never an issue following a morning's routine (though he likewise would not have the memories that push his showers post thirty analog ticks on occasion, but that's a separate matter altogether) and not so now, long past the one to his side has nested into dawn's soft hands.

Three hours after midnight's leave, he finds the comforter thieved and all his senses sweating in the muscle clenching fight to allow his mind rest. He's flipped to his favored position of abdomen to sheets, chin to pillow, forearms beneath. Tenor runs on a treadmill through his skull.

Something in him feels remorse, for his wrongdoings and flared temper, yet at the same time cannot claim sole possessor of his lullaby lost. Of course he feels rotten for shoving Togami so soured, for running ragged his emotions in a single afternoon. But there's-

His elbows shove inward to a raise of his head. The curtains flicker to the ceiling fan's breeze.

Togami- Where'd he come up with that name? Perhaps he has after so much thought recognized that worldwide celebrity he's never once seen. He could swear, still, that he recognizes seeing the name printed somewhere, the magazine kiosk at the metro when he'd reached for a retro gaming article and knocked over a stack of business ones (and he'd apologized profusely in that sweaty little nervous laughter of his, trembling with embarrassment to place them righted and waiting another hour for the next train once he'd turned his back to exhaust). Or another time, when he'd gotten a brand new phone and marveled at all the doohickeys, and Kirigiri had explained to him what reds and greens and dipping arrows meant in pointing through his stocks app. Or now, on that very same phone rendering his retinas burnt out in the dark of the room with a search engine pulled up, and his thumb's pad runs along all the cracks in his screen in scrolling through curiosity.

He's hunched in his seat at the dining table, the earliest sunlight his only partner, when he's met with the thick feel of  _presence_ behind him. Scroll. Blink.

"Suke6?" is all she says, because Saturday mornings are fried eggs and toast at their favorite cheapo breakfast place mornings. No reply meets her firstly, until she shifts just so and he tilts his head backward to peer up at her. His bangs fall upward comically. Sandpaper are the rims to his eyes.

"Do you know who Togami Byakuya is?" he asks. Either hand goes to his head to set it back proper, taking a seat beside him to look on inquisitive to the screen shown toward her.

"A business mogul, I suppose," she says, watching him swipe away a low battery notification. "I slept well last night."

His knees press together, leaning more forward to glance a glaze over. "This is the guy from the hotel yesterday. God, he's even more handsome in person."

Kirigiri wonders the relevance, and says null. He goes on, "He's a freakin' trillionaire, too. I guess you have to be pretty rich to stay at the Four Seasons, but he's like,  _loaded_ loaded. And in his twenties. He lives in Minato."

"And his blood type is A, and he was born at three:fourteen AM in a lovely hospital outside Osaka."

To that, his eyes swivel. "I'm not  _stalking_ him, or anything, jeez. Just...interested."

She spends time examining him as she so does, the twitch to his lids and the will forcing his expression together. Focus does not leave the pages he explores all throughout her drag of the chair backward gainst tile, tug of tie from hair in a cascade down on her swaying toward the bathroom door. It shuts in a classy thud. Steam pours from beneath in minutes following.

"Togami Byakuya..." melts to lips. Flush dusts the round angles to his face. It burns darker to his heart's stammer in his ribs next, once the screen's gone black to be replaced by numbers and different reds and greens. Anxiety is his shade to the acceptance after half a verse of  _I Wanna Be Sedated._

"...He-?"

 _"I don't know how you did it,"_ grates the voice he's spent a fair twenty hours thinking on,  _"But you've managed to be a good enough liar to trick me."_

"Huh?" And hardly can he breathe, and he knows it, but he asks regardless, "Who...Who's this?"

Some sort of chortle crackles to the receiver, sounds a shuffling, a poor mess.  _"Your husband, you candy-ass bastard."_


	9. Chapter 9

He's an idiot.

Boarding a flight that just so happens to be delayed- idiocy. Failing so miserable as to lose sixty grand on a whore who couldn't even coax the come from his balls- idiocy. Staying awake all night after such a hellstorm of a day, thinking about the stranger he'd fought tooth and nail and hated from the very first sight, scouring the deepest corners of every media conjurable through the internet, squandering sugar gilded kilometers off his Jaguar finding hospital records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and another two hundred driving from his newly rented hotel on the opposite skirts of the island to sit outside that big eyed thick thighed stranger's apartment at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning when he should be working-  _ha,_ idiocy.

"I refuse to be treated so foolishly," cuts he into the shuddering syllables wasting his data. "I'm outside. Let me in."

 _"You're-You're what?! How did you..."_ It isn't but another thirty seconds before he sees from above him two drapes part, frenetic warmed expression visible from two stories down in the driver's window of his car. He stuffs a finger upward toward it.

The front door creaks open tentatively. He's standing there, breath clumped up in his lungs because 2 flights of steps + 0 hours sleep = at least 1 full minutes of labored in-outs. But it matters not how aflame his throat dances, or that he can do fifty pushups per minute with a the weight of a grown man and the forty caret ring on his finger- and it's all way too much fucking math for seven in the morning, particularly when he's an endless stock of more pressing matters in each hand, one of them standing now in his apartment's open den to perhaps allow his own entry.

"Uh...hi?" A palm at his hip grasps still their call, the other at the door's wood in a hold only hesitant. Ready to slam in his face at the first move gone wrong. Togami thinks it a humor.

His neck cranes idly about the space, glance gone easily over the other's head to admire frame-lined walls, blankets wrinkled in their toss over couch back, DVD cases stacked neath television stand shelving in mild disarray that just screams  _oh, I'll get to that._ A living room that looks lived in. Abhorrent.

"Um," and it's that door, a shield, shoving forward as lightning strikes when he moves to press a step inward. His own hand grabs it back in twice the force, eyes of twice that further in their peer downward into the homeowner's. Naegi winces into himself, an accordion freed from its air. "I-I don't think I should let you in."

"Makoto," is his argument back (because he's  _always_ got one, or he'd be damned to call himself a Togami), grip relenting not upon the door. "You owe me much more than that. I'm coming in, and I'm receiving answers."

"Answers?" Seemingly, his brush past him is met in willingness's touch, a click behind them before he's trailed in quick skips.

He stands freshly in the center, peering more closely around at that and at this. "Yes," says he. No wall splits the living room from the kitchen, even more quaint in its minimal appliances, table in its midst a round portion of fake oak and strawberry jam stains. "I have the right to know what led to my accident, and why you've decided to take it as an opportunity to begin again your life without me. Why, suddenly, you've decided to take advantage of my impromptu reception of a disability."

Those brows furrow in the middle, those lips part to speak- but, oh, he's far from completion. "I suppose you hadn't planned on my recovery. How unfortunate for you to have been born so daft as to not realize the imperial faultlessness that is Togami Byakuya."

A moment passes hotly. Water's ambient hushing cuts off to a spun squeak a far corner off. Silence.

"Um," he attempts to try another time. Lengths of gray jogging pants lead to his hooded top, an ensemble two seasons too late for a shitty apartment with no central air. Togami flicks his attention anew up toward his chagrined face. "...What?"

" _Makoto."_ He'd slam his hands down had he anything slammable. Instead he opts for a step gone forward, angling himself sharp in that imperial faultlessness. "I saw the marriage license at city hall. I saw the note in my wallet in  _your_ handwriting. I remember you like salted caramel ice cream and wet your stupid bed until you were twelve. I remember your sister's eighteenth birthday party, where she got a motorcycle from that ugly best friend of hers and you said  _wow, for my eighteenth birthday I got a grocery store cake and a tee_   _shirt_." Winded once more, he pauses to huff more grievances wrung.  _"_ I  _remember,_ Makoto _,_ give up the act. I contracted amnesia, and your attempts to be rid of me have failed."

Though he's breathless, the feeling of triumph fills his lungs to the brim with vigor, leaning back against himself alone and folding arms loose over his chest. The other stares on, though where'd expected to bestow the horror, the mortification of being caught with palms sanguine, Naegi aims to him only perks northern, and Togami could make oath on the fact that those round hazels are milky with some long lost adoration.

"...What did the helmet look like?" throws his guard off the slightest, until he goes on, "The motorcycle helmet. What did it look like?"

His back straightens, mouth tightens. "Hello Kitty. You were jealous."

A silent gasp inward tilts his chin upward. No words exchange to the length where he's twisted sick for time gone lost in waste.

"If you're still too wrapped up in yourself to accept it," and, of course, he expects the resistance when he darts to grab him by the wrist. His hold is vise, such as the glare the demands be met. "Two Christmases ago I bought you a bracelet. It has the solar system on it, because you wouldn't shut up about space. I never saw you take it off since." Touch marries his sleeve lip. "If you aren't wearing it, I'll leave."

That same touch orders the fabric down in a pull. Nine little planets glint back to him.

Naegi plays the sculpture of ice dripping in his hand's heat. Waving, winding, he keeps himself his vitals thriving best as can be, peering up with his face that identical forced confident. Togami observes its slow undignified death, examines near the way his eyes do pinch at the corners, then all at once he's a string tugged seamless, and he drops his face to the sleeve he steals back in a wrenching sob.

"What the  _fuck?"_ In candor, he himself had met a fight the same, in the heaviest holes of the night had found himself reacting in palpitations to the chambers each time he should think on it too closely. Magic does not exist. Fate does not exist. Yet he's standing in Naegi Makoto's living room, because he's been looking for him all his lives without ever once knowing so. Or, no, he'd been sick, and no hospital on this side of the world had kept a record of it, and he's got no damage to his head whatsoever, and-

Then Naegi laughs through his tears, which is so much like him, he remembers, he recalls, and he says, "I've never seen you before yesterday. I have no idea who you are." He ducks forward in a harder bawling, a deeper guffawing. "But you- you use mint lip balm, because you really like mint ice cream but you're too embarrassed to eat ice cream in front of people." He's sunk to the carpet, forearms folded to kneecaps and face tucked hysterical into them. From the still parted curtains, morning light gleams off stone beaded Saturn. "How stupid is that?"

Blue eyes thin. He makes to speak, but a creaking takes the mic. Gathered is his sight long over one shoulder, through the kitchen and to the single door pulled open to unleash the sauna behind it. A lithe form saunters out, jeans and cotton tee and leather gloves guiding a towel about her damp hair. Her glance is bored when it meets his. He balks, until she says, "Don't worry," shakes her synthetic locks down the length of her spine, "My girlfriend is much cuter than him."

Back to the ward escapee. Really though- he himself could better befit the title, what with chasing so neatly after someone he's once seen, in all sorts of claims that bobble the skull about the vertebrae. He hasn't a backing to his madness. And then Naegi- his Makoto -is standing again, is lifting fingers to clasp the other's fragile.

"...I sold my rings to a pawn shop," he says, choking on more laughs that read not so much bemusement. "I didn't know how to explain that I woke up one morning with them on my finger and no one else in bed. ...So, thanks for-  _heh_ _-_ paying off my student loans."

It's fair, he hasn't worn his own since the morning he too'd found his third digit squeezed in a strange and knee buckling sensation, but- but that means nothing as to this other, who's still standing there, still  _lying_ to him, and he's...holding his hand so soft and so sweet and it fits so right- and- and Togami Byakuya is completely and utterly fucked if he's to continue on believing his dogmas over magic and fate.

He thinks he's rather  _fucked_ anyway, what with the way Naegi's glancing up toward him, and he's smiling now, like he's any privilege to, like he's just met the love of his life he's hoped would be on the other end of every phone's chime.

And Togami realizes his search has met its end, and this is the miniscule personality that renders him a firecracker popped, strands of sunkisses and glowing and all that, and green is right, green that catches summer in each blink of lashes thick and delicate. And the way they look at him, in joy's perfection and sorrow's best effort, in sickness and in health, that's magic, and that's fate, and Togami Byakuya is so royally undeniably fucked six ways from Sunday.

That's the day things begin to come together, anyhow, so he supposes it's for the best.

They're sitting on the pristine white velvet of his living room furniture, because it is only courteous to invite your husband over for brunch once he's sobbed into your chest and you've fled from his apartment in swift movements that do not halt until muscles find bed sheets and a day dies to slumber alone. Their third phone call had been,  _hm,_ just a  _touch_ awkward, but it'd ended in a sweet nodding and exchange of an address, and there'd been a hesitance before it'd dropped that Togami cannot decide upon wishing to know the meaning of or not. Either way, either tar marred quake shook way, Naegi's here and sitting on his couch, staring blankly at the plated scone in his lap.

Much as that second call, he finds his collar tight in discomfort.

"So, uh-" Inevitable. "How've you been?"

He tilts his vision to take peer to him. A fork breaks idle through a million layers of warm pastry. "You wouldn't understand even if I told you."

"Right." He flinches. Crumbles of frosting break politely in his teeth.

Ten feet separate the couches they rest each upon, Togami placed in delicate comfort on the longest and Naegi perched at a loveseat cushion like it's ruby stuffed. Togami sips from his teacup's gilded rim, sets it back to the table aside him. He thinks this encounter rather pathetic, seeing as though they've run thirty innings of straight homers yet cannot shove a conversation past smalltalk. Perhaps need he be the one to toss away the dainty scalpel and delve palms into viscera.

"That woman," is his first arrow loaded to bow. On an instant, Naegi pokes his nose toward him. "The one in your home yesterday. Your sister?"

The treat sets back to the china. "Oh...ah, kind of." Somewhere in his tone, there's a sunshine smile. "Not by blood though. Oh, but we-we aren't dating, or anything. She's just...Kirigiri."

"An unobtainable delicacy?" banters he, head tilted lazy to a palm. Naegi...just shrugs, and says nothing, and it's maladroit all the fuck over again.

Though, when he does at last, Togami believes it only more so. "What about that guy in the hotel room? Your brother?"

His upper lip sneers in a violent tug of muscle. "The more you speak, the less I understand what it is I ever saw in you."

"Sorry, sorry, bad joke," he excuses, a hand fanning his tight simper. It drops, as go his eyes to lap, then about the room in a surveying. "Uh- you like...art?"

He  _likes_ to boast the tiers to his power through exorbitant spans of paintings along clean architecture, likes to boast his intellect by chattering on about each and every brush stroke. Gorgeous Cézanne stills. Degas' ballerinas  _croisé devanting_ across the walls. His favorite- an original he'd splurged as a personal birthday gift some years ago-  _Olympia_ looks onward above the mantle, her eyes igniting something in him that spills dare. To a gushing slice in his abdomen, he recalls the way that tongue had moved around asininity on her arrival home, and he'd dried his throat in a half hour's lecture on the differences betwixt Manet and Monet (and Mozart, at another point, because his sweetheart had taken an art class freshman for the credits alone).

Fathoms come to him after several minutes of talking on over the works, the lengths to which he'd gone for the acquiring, the framing, the placing. Naegi looks on in wonder, scanning loosely over them. His eyes take to one specific, widen a touch to the melody of hot embarrassment. "Oh, wow. That's a-"

" _L'Origine du Monde,"_ he bites in. "Courbet. 1866."

The dark blush he spies along the other's complexion grates his nerves for the pure immaturity alone.

"Wow," he says again, "...You really like...um, naked women."

"It's  _fine art,_ Makoto." His eyes roll. Another long sip to ease him.

"...Right." Scone. Nibble.

Porcelain clinks together at the setting of cup to saucer. He brings to either temple two fingers, rubs hard circles and prays just mildly for the pressure to blast his sockets cleared.

"Look," he declares after a silent bout of chewing and of sipping. One knee rests folded over its twin. "We very obviously have an issue here."

"Just one?"

Togami glares.

" _Look,"_ and he sits more forward. "...I am not entirely swayed yet to the fact that I've'nt been part of some foolish grade school prank, though going off the idea that this is all genuine...I think it's in our best interest to retrace steps."

Naegi puckers his mouth, index tapping to chin. "Hmm..." His hands fold together. "Well, okay. I thought about it more last night, and I think I remember some stuff, too."

Quirk goes to his expression that beckons onward, "You...went to Green Hills High, before transferring to Hope's Peak. That's where we went to high school together."

Togami steeples his fingers before his mouth, listening. Naegi sweats a vague tone.

"Uh...you...you don't like getting blood drawn. You say it's a waste of perfect DNA, or something." Into himself, he curls in brief thought, then expands horizons to a smirk gone demon. "You love getting head-"

 _"Alright."_ Not yet a single misstep, however. Boldly, a scowls etches in. "...This is hardly helping anything. Think back- how'd we get ourselves into this situation? Whatever it may be. My vote stands at dual head trauma."

"Mmm..." shakes his head. "Kirigiri would remember you then, if it was just us two who forgot everything. Maybe...God?"

 _"God?_ That's your answer?"

"Well-"

"I'm sick to my stomach over  _k_ _ami no michi_ being the go to excuse when things should go awry. I have such little respect for you as it is, bringing religion into the matter deafens to me to all other opinions you have that may  _possibly_ hold any sense."

Togami folds into himself, turns his jaw a sharp right to unmatch their looks. That same finger goes again to chin in thought, and Naegi says to him, "So you're saying, you  _do_ have a little respect for me?"

The ache returns to his forehead. Again, he faces him, and where Naegi had more than likely intended a sly jokester's tongue (because in times of searing awkward, he's only humor for a defense mechanism, evidently) is met with heart serrated to expose a center oozing. "...I have supposed that anyone who's earned my... _affections_ should also be worthy of a certain level of reverence."

Slight- chuckling kisses him. "Not love though."

" _Love_ is what got us here in the first place." He goes to a gracious sip. "No, there will be none of that."

"Wait, seriously?" Two round suckers are his eyes as they pin him. "You...want to break up?"

Togami cannot explain his expression next, because never before has he aimed such contemptuous disgusted all-knowing confusion toward someone. "You imply we're  _together_ somehow? It's preposterous, Makoto. We hardly know each other."

"You know I was a bed wetter," he says, "You know I like salted caramel ice cream and about my sister's motorcycle."

"Ah, yes," and it's so jeering in just the intro alone, "I know about your piss, your dessert preferences, and Naegi Komaru's Hello Kitty scooter."

It shocks him into a slosh of liquid over rim, what with the way Naegi so suddenly stands and points to him with a wildcat's grin in determined soul. " _HA!_ I never said my sister's name. You knew that, too."

Cup to saucer to side tabletop. In all stoic, he unfolds the mauve pocket square from his breast and rubs the splotch of tea from its matching necktie.

"Why is it, that you've become so adamant over this cause?" His voice is a smooth ray, worth an audio book's envy. "Was it not I who began this? Who, initially, had to be the one to convince  _you_ of this all?"

Naegi's chest expands around the defender's breath. Cautious, he sits to his spot, plated scone neat atop the sofa arm. "I just...I don't want you to lose you again, Byakuya."

His chin tilts a fraction higher. He wonders how one is to lose what never was theirs, what they have not claimed the faintest brush of fingertips across, but says naught of it. When boiled down to cast iron bottom, the fever greeting each rush through veins could be traced unto the weakness, the fear the loathing of loss. He's more a man to allow things their simmer a while, and as it fizzles low about their shared space, he wishes he'd remembered the do not disturb sign.

But again- he's  _always_ the debater, to even himself no other, to even himself now as not the exception in his reciprocated delirium. But he'd much like to live his life onward at least  _knowing_ why the note had been in his wallet, why the gold band had clamped his finger, why he's been ever since lusting for another's touch to birth him anew into the light of graced belonging.

"Here." The square's been tucked back in another  _I'll get to it_ type manner, instead yanking the drawer from the short end table to bring forth a writer's artillery. Ballpoint runs creamy as his baritone. "Keep this in your pocket. When you wake up in the morning, call me, if you still remember. Perhaps we've stumbled upon some sort of twenty four hour loop."

The fingers that accept the note are warm in their grasp. He scans it a moment in quiet, and as the loon he is, "Yeah, like  _Groundhog Day._ " And Togami peers to him another bit of that confused and dazed and repulsed. "Y'know, Bill Murray. Sonny and Cher,  _bum bum ba, I got you, babe._ "

He's opened up to the chatting in their echoing plight to the foyer, that expectant purse of lips still aimed for him once they've parted to either side of the threshold, hand on the doorknob and pupils as glaze in insipidity as when he'd been made to watch all the films Naegi could prattle a week's worth on each.

"You make me question my sanity," he says, and shuts the door in the other's face.

Echo.


	10. Chapter 10

It would take a week for him to get a valid Xanax prescription.

Imagine being so spoiled as to have the time, he thinks.

The lights of the all night pharmacy feel an apocalypse staged to the dead of evening's curtain. He's halfway concerned for his sputtery little vehicle's engine after driving so long as to carry the sun to rest. Anything is deemed a better option than sitting at home, himself and his thoughts tied at the throats. So he'd gone for a drive, and ended up all the way to Doutou, in a convenience store at one AM because neither Kuwata nor Hagakure had answered to his groupchat plea of  _hey...weed?_

He settles for a nudie mag with a handsome blond on the cover, and an eight ounce Ramune.

On his list of days that have made him believe he ought to be detained, the full weekend has just jumped to the top (just above when he'd knocked his two front teeth out ice skating with his father after skipping daycare one morning, and the adult set had grown in far enough apart to jab his tongue through, and his sister had laughed and laughed and laughed at him and then cried and cried and cried when the tooth fairy came the next summer and she'd been granted the same set- but-) But he's getting off topic so far that he nearly knocks his taillight out in reversing from the lot.

Anything's better than being alone with his thoughts, he supposes.

The sun's yet to stir on his park into his own driveway, his lethargy dragged up the flights, his weighted fall back to his duvet with arms widespread and a plastic bag dangling from his fingers.

When his eyes open next, the bag's clunked to the floor, his lumbar feels a forest fire and the vibrations at his nightstand knock at his cerebrum the same.

 _Naegi!_ the text shouts back at him once he's opened the notif. Twelve:eleven yells twice as loud from the screen's top.  _I cannot cover for you two days in a row, young man! Skipping work is NOT going to move you forward in life!!!!!_

Though it is written, he winces just the same as if she were standing before him, arms akimbo and tongue a beating ruler to his knuckles.

 _(Sent Monday, 12:14 PM):_ _sorry yukizome i'll be intoday!_

The phone sets back to the table. He leans his head to the cooled wall, lids burning when they shut to  _breathe_ a moment.

He hasn't brushed his hair when he's pulling out onto the first street off his corner, but at least it doesn't look so differed from his norm. Lukewarm melon Ramune sits in the cup holder aside the gear shift. Breakfast.

There's two dozen cars placed ahead of him at his approach to an intersection light. Fingers tighten at the top of the wheel, sighing himself into a lean back and inhaling this time in agitation than coveted relax. The radio dial twists in his grasp to blaring something poppy from the month's top ten. Anything, anything.

Anything next is the fist crumpled note tossed atop his dashboard. He peeks up over it, lifts a touch to it. The writing's crisp, stark black, makes him recall the funny bubbles in his middle at the idea that even sexy staid-mouthed trillionaires have junk drawers in their living rooms full of papers, pens, odds, ends.

Crisp, stark black:  _T_ _ogami._ Blank at every other edge.

He chokes on his teeth at the horn blaring behind him. Zero dozen cars split him from the gleaming green. Floor.

His attention is shared between two vying children- the road and the note from the yesterday that hurt tenfold worse than shattering enamel on hard winter ice. Perhaps comes its triplet; the knot formed thick in his chest.

Not once has a sane man thanked traffic, but he regains a shred of normalcy in his glances and prayers about the bounds of his Corolla for officers to be on their lunch breaks now. In his recents, scroll, search, hope. And to his sweet summertime smile, it's there,  _he's_ there, eleven candy digits that mean too much.

Device to ear, swallow to throat, sweat to innards.

_"Makoto."_

He near moans in the relief of it all.

"Hi," he says, shifting the phone to pinch in one shoulder while taking a corner turn. "You remembered."

 _"Unfortunate, I know."_ Naegi almost laughs.  _"You're positive I didn't hit my head on a ski trip?"_

"I can't imagine either of us skiing." He frowns at the Jeep that moves to cut him off, but allows a waved hand forward regardless. "Bermuda Triangle?"

_"Shut up."_

He complies.

Tires clunk along the road ahead long, long minutes. He's since arrived in the bustling city that takes his heat each morning. Forty stories high sits his goal over the skyline, beginning the turn into its uphill lot when he's reminded by a jostling that he's not his own privacy this trip.

_"Well, goodbye, then."_

"Wait!" And for what, he knows absolutely not. He sits forward in his parking spot in the back, seatbelt tugging against his pounding chest. There's a  _look_ in his face, in his eyes, in his gnawed upon lip. "I-"

Buzzes drives his palm tickled mad. The device falls from his torrid cheek to steal a glance at, and he purses all over to such a bludgeon to punctuality. Ambivalence fights him between which call to claim, decides ultimately with such a lightswitch kicked skyward to continue the first, gusto in his hope, luck, everything to mumble.

"Scale of one to ten...how open would you be to fortune telling?"


	11. Chapter 11

_Absolute fucking zero,_ he'd said.

His shoes are worth thousands more than the carpeting they sink into. The front door had accepted timid knuckle taps, had been flung open and its assailant yanked in fervor into a squeeze that could crush his skull like chewing gum. It's inundating _-_ that's all he can notice, as they're led through this apartment even dingier than the last he'd visited. More than lived in, this one looks died in, proved further once they past an overturned wicker basket acting as a table to carved skull candle holders. Wax drips messy down the lengths of them, they and their dozen cousins about the space its only light source. Voodoo mood lighting, perhaps, though he'd guess more accurately that they'd nothing to fund the electric bill this month.

" _Riiight_ through  _heeere,"_ their host says in a hushed string of elongated syllables. More mood lighting. His tree trunk of an arm brushes aside bead strands hanging as a divider in the den to kitchen archway. Naegi walks easily below it. Togami ducks low in scorn to move past.

They enter the compact room, hardly space to expand his lungs with the refrigerator and oven kitty-cornered so near. The addition of three people tightens it to impossibility, flipped thrice that again by the presence of yet another.

" _Weeelcooome,"_ this yet another greets them in the same ghostly tone, facing opposite them with arms tucked into himself. Strong shoulders whip to switch his position, and he shouts, "to  _mystery_ _!"_ as those tucked arms lead to hands bobbing two spheres beneath his tee shirt top, grinning hellfire bright as his lengths of uncombed hair.

"I'm leaving," Togami says to a swivel on his heel.

" _Byakuya-"_

The bear leading them mutes the background noise. "No crystal ball boobies now, Leochi, I have clients over."

Careful in their lengths, the two glass orbs are set to the round center table. "Ah, come on, I'm bored as hell with no TV. 'Sides, it's just Naegs and his catch of the week." That beam changes from jocular to wolf born. Togami thinks someone who bleeds such an air of  _kick me in the balls_ should wear more than a tee shirt and boxers.

Naegi burns in time to the candles around them. "Uh...sure." A hand pulls from his overcoat pocket to gesture upwards. "This is Togami. We need to...figure some stuff out. You can help us, right, Hagakure?"

The clairvoyant in question smiles, brows pinched in bold determination. "Thirty percent accuracy rating, one hundred percent satisfaction rating."

Togami wonders how tight this man's ponytail must be to come up with such an equation. He takes the seat he's offered, anyway, and that annoying forth stranger is shooed off behind the maple wood door aside the fridge, so it's hardly so bad as it could. And he's desperate for something to grasp at.

"So, um-" tries Naegi from his side, but it works only to draw a finger to lips in a wet  _shh!_

"Have to feel your auras first, Naegichi. Have to  _feel_ you."

At one side of the kitchen table, they glance at each other tightly. Focus is captured by a demand to close their eyes ( _and feeeel yourselves,_ but he'd rather save that for when he's no audience besides the box of DVDs beneath his bed) to which Naegi plays obedient, lids coming together in an exhale. Togami watches the two, stupidity open and vulnerable, sinking deep within the gaudy glaze of the extrasensory.

"I can't feel you, Togamichi," Hagakure chides, large hands roaming over one of the crystal implants placed under them. "Pretend you're all alone, in your happy place. What do you think about?"

"A thirty round clip and a warrant for my arrest," he mutters, arms folding in the permission for strong blues to lax.

"Good! What about you, Naegichi?"

"Um," his lips is bite hard upon. "I'm thinking about, how Tuesday is one of my days off, so technically I'm fine, but I still told Yukizome I'd cover for her today and I really don't want her to wake up and read the text I sent her." One eye peeks open to the two blazing down toward him from his left, and he's quick to mend, "But-But, also, that I want to figure out what's going on with Togami and me."

They're allotted the grace of sight again at the teller's prompting, and he's leaned forward on his forearms once they do. "I'm sensing...romance troubles?"

Naegi nods, agog. Togami rolls his vision back.

"Mhm, mhm, I knew it." Hands, crystal. "A little lover's spat is nothing to worry over, my boys. It happens to the best of us, you'll figure it  _aaall_ out."

"Thank you for the faith healing," quips the sharpest, "Now could you explain how it is two people know the most finite details of one another without ever having met?"

Hagakure slaps the table, eyes boggling in his head as he begs they go on. The reaction startles Naegi into a press of himself backward, but he explains to his best, spinning the duct tape around sixty rotations in search of its start, piecing together what they can of it all. The baton passes several times to toss a component in here, a fabricated specific in there (then an immediate fix by the more candid of the two, to the first's chagrin). Their spectator nods them along the whole way, guffawing tears sprung and bawling them harder with a wrist thrown to eyes, cycling back forth to their story's completion where he rests in the same pose as former.

"It's simple," he decides after the horror show fades. "You're too in love with each other, the universe had to split you up." His grin is just  _so_ cheeky. "But you still found each other, anyhow."

" _Too_ in love?" Togami sneers. " _Please,_ I can hardly stand to be in the same room as him."

"So that's why you practically shoved 'im in a Goddamn iron maiden so he'd believe you and stick around?" The comment draws attention long over shoulders. Sneer turns to scowl. That same punk rests in a lean to the doorframe, bits of bedroom visible behind him a hurricane's chaos.

"Leochi is right," whips his head back the other way. Hagakure sits, crossed arms a downtalking, though sends no signals of malice in his peach rimmed voice. "I must diagnose you with head over heels."

"And I hope to God it's fatal." The chair takes his tugging flame for a palm, freeing himself from the compression of the wood around him to stalk outward in a fling of an arm through beads.

In tandem, the others stand likewise, Hagakure with enough force to knock his chair flat to its spine. Frantic; "For my unique and excellent services I must charge you a small fee!"

Trillions of cells freeze together, draw his form back at one side in lethal slow. Once, he blinks.

Flesh melts from bones. Hagakure swallows, a fine smile tense around his struggling wit. "Fr-Friends and family discount! Fifty thousand yen only."

Another moment of seething ends with his reach into jacket's dull juniper pocket, and each the second two are reminded, vague, of several moons prior when he throws a haphazard handful of bills to him. They rain against his frantic dancing fingers.

"Come on, Makoto," he bites, and the puppy trails him, natural, past the beads and the candles and honeylocust hocus pocus to meet new to fresh June.

The door's still ringing its slam into the kitchenette, one leant to frame and the other pawing through banknotes.

He looks upwards in vim.

"Electric or water first?"


	12. Chapter 12

They're parked behind his shitty apartment, in his shitty Corolla, eating shitty fast food at the same day's peak into gentle evening.

The parking spot, because he's not yet so intrepid as to invite him upstairs, the Corolla because Togami Byakuya is too masculine to take directions from someone else and too ostentatious to allow that someone else to drive the newly purchased Bugatti he'd pulled to the curb in. The fast food, because Naegi had been driving and Naegi had been hungry and cranky on the ride home, so he's sitting crinkling the paper around a cheeseburger as he gnashes into it in the front seat.

Togami trains his focus defiantly out the passanger window.

"Sorry about my friends," he says to kill the quiet. A thumb pad swipes the ketchup from his bottom lip. "I know you're not into, like, eclectic people."

" _Eccentric,"_ he scorns. Naegi decides the proper correction, really, is  _any._ "I've wasted a full afternoon and haven't got a single answer still. It's ludicrous."

Tapping bats to his knee. "Well," and his hands do all sorts of transactions, setting down and opening and rifling through four years of papers and nonsense through the glove compartment. "We should at least prepare for whatever happens, you know, like that little note in your wallet." He finds some folded scrap sheet advertising a festival in the park two summers past, flips it over and bites the cap from a marker to scrawl in red permanence. " _Hi, it's me, Naegi Makoto. I know this sounds weird, but we're married. Call me."_ Aside it, he pens eleven numbers.

The flyer folds, tears off into two halves he hands over to him. "Keep that one, and write one for me this time, too."

Togami stares down at the note. Naegi swears, as he lifts his milkshake straw to his mouth, the paper trembles ever slight.

"I think I'd be more likely to listen to a palmist and his punk scum roommate than this," he murmurs, accepting, too, the marker to poise at the manila paper.

Moments pass in quiet sipping, scribbling, until he sits straightened and reads, " _Togami. 003-7146-9320. Do not contact after nine PM."_

He pouts. Togami notices.

"What? What's wrong with it?"

"It's just," Naegi starts, exhausted. The rim of his cup's lid peels away to the dim streetlights. "It could be a little more...I don't know, personal?"

"What would you like, Makoto, my credit card information?" His teeth breathe a  _tch,_ ink going to page again. "If you expect me to write you a love letter, you're- Oh, stop that. Don't dip."

Midway through motion, he pauses, glances left. "Huh?"

A harsh glare fixes to his fingertips. "French fries in your milkshake. You always do that, it's  _revolting."_

Millions- it's the figure to which his mind has problems, has pounds weighing it down ragged. Two thirds at least can be attributed to the last finger set of days, if only he should be so generous. He'd like nothing more than to hole away beneath his blankets, stain the pillow linens in liner and shame.

Naegi doubles forward in laughter.

"After all that's gone on,  _this_ is what you're concerned with?" Behind his palm, his lips are stretched taut to mirth, hazels pinched. The coverage drops back to the weapon of choice, scooping a generous clump up with one fry that prods toward him. "It's good, I swear. Too bad you're lactose intolerant, or I'd make you- Oh!" In a sudden alignment of posture, the flavor of dairy free frosting fills his mouth (which had been rather tasteless, but he'd been too distracted by how cold pulse handsome the reason behind it had looked in a neat pressed suit coat and blazing red lapel corsage, and he was thankful for the absence of butter and cream later on when scrubbing it from his pores, anyway). "...I just remembered that. Heh."

Vanilla drips to the center console. Togami watches on in disgust.

"Yes," he says after a while of quieted chewing, sipping, stirring. Lenses push upwards on his bridge. "That's why I'm not rather fond of eating mint ice cream in front of others. Having the shits in public isn't as glorious as it seems."

Combined with such a bombardment of laughs from his core, the scarfed meal threatens a reprise.

"Alright," comes after the bout drains gone save for bits of giggles leftover. Emptied, the cup drops to the holder aside tepid melon Ramune. "I take it back, that's not such a stupid reason." He turns his cheek to the headrest to look him over, sincere and simpering. "But you have to take back the rainbow sherbet comment, then."

"The what?" Blink.

Chuckle. "How you said it's stupid that I only eat the green part. It's not my fault I don't like the rest." Tongue prods from mouth. "Fruit's not really my thing."

"Makoto," illmatches the atmosphere of his light heart. "I have no idea what you're on about."

"Sure you do." Only now does he begin to display that idle confound. "We were standing outside the...diner...and we... Oh, my God."

There's snow flecks in his hair and smoke on his tongue, and the talking talking talking talking, and the rubber worn soles to his Converse shoes linger still with the smell of cheap coffee. His skull rattles with the tune of an overseas Billboard hit, a lovesick little tune in a hole in the wall cafe.

Before the other's even a reaction's timeframe, the marker is thieved from him, notes that had been each divvied taking the warning underlined, bolded, exclamation pointed in crimson.

** _DON'T FALL IN LOVE!!!!!!!_ **

"You're kidding," Togami exclamation points bolds underlines back at it. "You think I'll have any issue-"

"It resets when we fall in love with each other," Naegi near hollers in a swivel of waist toward him. "I know, Byakuya, because I  _remember._ It was snowing, and-and we kissed, and then I woke up in my bed. Alone."

"Makoto." Glasses up bridge. "Have you ever heard of a  _dream?_ "

In a fit, he tosses the marker to his bicep, aims to him a pissy little puff-cheeked expression. "I'm serious, listen to me! We can't fall in love with each other, or-or Groundhog Day will never end." He falls back in a more settled state, long stare out the window to the fading day. "I can't stay in this loop my whole life. How long have I been a stupid hotel maid for? Fifty years?" A wide blink takes him into awe. "Or, do we just start new lives all over? How many times have I been born into a new life where I'm married to... _this?!"_

More so than to that  _this_  he speaks to himself aloud, flailing hands and gesticulations and cherry chapstick crying desperate. "So, we're just,  _married?_ How can we just  _be_ married when we wake up? Do we have kids? Oh, my God," And he pauses the tirade to turn to him another time. "We have to have a baby, right now."

"Makoto."

"I think I'm ovulating right now, that's like the week after your period ends, right?" Hands fumble to the button of his jeans. A sharp bark halts him.

"Do you realize how much of a lunatic you sound like right now?" That same french fries in milkshake disgust burns him charred. "Keep your Goddamned pants on, or I'll make you bleed twice as much as last week."

Naegi keeps his Goddamned pants on.

He relaxes backward, caught by the clip of his tone as though a slap from hysterics. Everything to him seems a fist clenched disaster, emotions and thoughts, wishes, dreams, wonders. "...I just...can't stand the thought of forgetting you."

Threatening to his lids come tears, though he refuses their falling, squeezes his eyes to slits in it. He finds himself again in moments following, shakes lengths of brunette bedhead to glance at his left. The other does not meet it. His sight catches the click of the marker to the dashboard, capped.

"...I should be going," Togami excuses. Streetlamps glow his face a pale honey, perfection in his soft pads of lashes.

Naegi is to force himself the capture of his breathless staring into a second shake. "Right. Um...I hope I see you later."

Half the flyer folds into a square, tucks into his inside pocket. His swallow is thick against his buttoned collar.

The lot takes the soft echo of the passenger door closing. Naegi decides his eyes would burn should he attempt the watch of him going, the tug of his own car opened and sat within, the way he hesitates, and he can see under the dim lights the way he keeps his own vision trained down, down, down a choking moment before the engine is riled and exhaust blows smoke rings as a parting gift. Naegi decides he'll just have to use drops before bed.

He's red rimmed in fatigue by the time he's lain down harsh to his top sheet. Toes take to pushing off either sneaker. They clunk cacophonous to the floor.

Thoughts do him no good, though he's nothing else to entertain. Once he's deemed himself liable for movement, it is to contract his arm at the elbow, lift the sheet held still in his grasp into eyes' view.

_Togami._

A trillionaire's name for the syllables drenched in their entendre; dairy free frosting, coffee and sandwiches, untied laces and hearts done up too tight, the first dance that was their last, rushing to be late with bites to necks and steam up the mirrors, a citric burst of feeling that is their fleeting glances through each others' grasps.  _The white frames look best on you._ Slips on ice and catches in the nick. Palms to forehead sweltering, spoons to tired mouth. Embracing by moonlight. Kisses at sunrise.

And to his spreading warmth, he folds it into safekeeping at a hip pocket. The replacement is found in immediacy, with his thumb swiping to unlock his phone and ignore a dozen messages from the day's earlier that paint him in contrition. Regardless, he lingers a moment to the opened screen, the  _003-7146-9320,_ the hearth hidden behind his organs. It flicks flame to each finger as they type, his lips as they tremble in hesitance before an entering, and he lays back with the dark screen held to his chest, lids fallen closed in a color he wishes to slice the hue from, a single rose poking up from the hedge he should have ripped from the roots by a chainsaw's starving maxilla.

Fingers graze along nine little planets.


	13. Chapter 13

He's dizzy in molten sickness at a stoplight thirty five miles later when he feels the vibration at one hip.

Slow is he to retrieve it. Pained beyond a thousand nights is he to set vision upon it.

_(Tuesday, 8:52 PM) Makoto: oops._


	14. Chapter 14

"Mako _tooo!"_

It's the mantra he hasn't drunk since the earliest sun wakes of academy days. Mild are his mumbles in refusal, stirs of legs beneath covers thick to repel the first month's sway. And though he's been troubled so a five finger's count already, the sixth meets no new trial, the roll unto his back and readjustment of dried tongue.

Somewhere behind the lull, he takes in the shuffling, the poke of head past door's frame, socks on tile the whole way to a catch of hand to it. His eyelids flutter to the scent of staring, shred their grog entirely to the weight dropped atop him, one hundred eight pounds that feel more eighteen-hundred when sat so harsh on his waist. He coughs to a whapping on either cheek.

"Get  _up,_ butthead, Dad said we're leaving in five minutes!"

A startled  _mrow!_ guides the skitter of paws springboarded from his bed's end. With what sense he's able to grasp, he grips her at the wrists, shoves a brotherly strength only to her backward. She tumbles into herself, knees bending to kiss shoulders near, and in that same brotherly, brotherly way, he laughs.

"Come on, get  _up,_ Komaru, we're leaving in five-!"

From where he'd risen to haunches, a fall again steals him in a powdery brick to the face. He grasps the pillow, and by the time he's tugged it away, his sister's slid socks to tile all the way gone, giggles her lingering perfume down the hall.

He smirks to himself sole.

Two socks his own press the carpet aside the disaster zone of a bed now, stretching arms tall above him with that smile the same. Betwixt the curtains winks morning stun, holding him at the tightest a hug can be without the surpassing of comfort. It halos his face so kindly, and he sits perched on the bed he's missed a while long, appreciating, longing, anticipating.

Then five minutes is two minutes, and he decides he ought to at least get dressed.

He's following that, feet hopping to tug from him the dark of his graphic tee (replaced by a twin who finds a fraternal name in its scent) and jeans that leave still lines up either leg. Toothpaste spits into the sink as he recalls a need to zip the new pair's fly.

"Here, sweetheart," is his greeting after a jaunt to the stairs descended. His mother draws an  _oof_ from him in her heavy exchange to his chest a pile of folded garments. "All freshly washed."

Each cheekbone meets an eternal ache from those eternal smiles. "Thanks, Mom. I'll have Kirigiri remind me to wash what I wore last night, too."

Her palm pats his face delicately, tells him the others have found their way to the car and that she's still left to find her purse, and he thinks how sweetly genetics can on occasion align. The suitcase leant by the front door opens its maw in waiting for his stuffing further it. He tugs the handle upward in the same moment his mother lay scarf at his shoulders, and they walk a pair to the crackling winter.

The quiet city drive is not so harsh as would find them in the hours claiming rush. Aside all the chaos of the holidays, the questioning to how he's enjoying college his first year ( _oh, it's good! finals were a little tough, though, heh),_ what he thinks of the gifts he's been given ( _oh, I love it, Auntie Mina, I've always wanted an argyle hat),_ the ever prodding  _Makoto you're so handsome! Have you got a girlfriend yet?_   _(oh, ahah- nope, still looking...)-_ aside it all, he'd owned hardly a moment's relax, and two tiny weeks had felt an open close of his eyes and he's back in the car again to return to his dorm. Suit him, it does nicely, as he's found himself rather nostalgic for wherever he exists not. The feel of the doorknob in his palm in foreign in its coolness, delectable in its twist.

He enters to darkness, stark black blankets the same tornado he'd left them the morning of his English final he'd made it to forty three seconds on time. A glance goes about the room, the bed, the table, the bed's sister just as messy, cold laundry piled atop. Posters, stereo, warmth. He sighs not a touch discontented, lips smooth to bliss in a gripping of the door in attempt to close it.

" _BWAH!"_

"Holy  _fuck!"_ Backward he stumbles till spine kisses wall, leg caught over his suitcase's height dragging him to a close fall flat. Ten hundred beats per minute flick the hand clutching his chest. "Jeez, Kuwata, I've been back for thirty seconds and you're already trying to kill me."

His roommate bends forward, palms to knees, laughter ludic taunts. On his lift back right, he's a flee in one offered to yank the other inwards. "Missed the hell outta ya, what can I say? I've been waiting behind that damn door for twenty minutes, too, slowpoke."

"I didn't expect you to be back already." Once released from the chokehold of a hug, he steadies himself to his feet alone, beams broad to him. "How was Christmas?"

Arms go strongly akimbo. "Pretty killer. Maizono still hasn't talked to me since I gave her those panties, though." Naegi recalls the ordeal finely, and he'd chime in his two cents that saying  _well, if you don't like it I can give it to Mioda instead_ hadn't done him any favors, but Kuwata's already struck a finger to the air in great epiphany. He saunters to clear fistfuls of clothes from his bed, and seeing the random toiletries strewn between makes Naegi guess its way of unpacking. From beneath the pile, he produces a box, long and thin. "Check it."

Naegi's expression alights a rival to the contents it unsheathes. "New lava lamp? Awesome!"

"Yepperino." His grin dances all the way to setting it at their beds' center, a lean to find the plug's home, harsh curse upon beating his skull to the table bottom on a rise. He's rubbing the sore spot as he flicks the switch to brightness.

Admiral blue is admired keenly in its bubbles upward. It's turned a forest brush orange by the time he's allowed his vision's relent, drags his luggage to stand beside his weighted perch on his bed. The crumpled outfit that'd played a loafer's pajamas tug from the zip pulled top first, stacks of prim clothes joining their rest atop his comforter. "Oh," delights his mouth upon the forgotten discovery below them. He lifts the cellophane in gentle fingers that offer outward; "Toffee?"

Kuwata snatches a square, collapses flat to his bed to chew it. "Your mom make this?" And to the nodded, crunch muted reply, "I still remember those chocolate chip muffins from when you first moved in. Now, there's a woman I'd let cougar me."

"Gross, dude." Plastic folds over the rest of the treat, stuffed to his nightstand drawer aside rattling prescription bottles. He's smiling, endless, as he takes to emptying the rest of the bag. Several new items touch his joy, trinkets that'll collect dust but look pretty as they do so, those more practical in his warmth or washing. A pair of kneesocks lays against his hand to match the gruff from a skip away; he glances up in perfect timing to meet the other's, lake's rippled reflection to his curious tilt, and the riverbed swallows him whole in a glare. Naegi flinches back, watches the stranger across the hall through their own doorway left free, as he takes handsome steps out of sight.

"Man, I think that guy stayed in his room the whole break," Kuwata says in the bleeding silence, having spied him likewise in his kneel at the second bed to reach for more snacks. Chomp goes the first mouthful. "Probably going to wipe the cobwebs out of his ass."

He purses, breaks his own square off the brittle. "Mm, he's not so bad," he swallows. "He's in my Calc class. He sits by himself in the back, I should talk to him sometime."

"Yeah, and get your balls bit off." Kuwata brushes his hands together to rid the crumbs. "Remember when he came over to yell at us in the middle of the night 'cause our music was 'too loud'? Stuck up prick."

Naegi brushes the crumbs from his comforter. "Maybe he's just...lonely."

Longways, his stares rests past the paneling.


	15. Chapter 15

_Insolent fucking brats._

Perhaps the best way to describe urination is not by ire, but regardless he's poised before the urinal of the communal wash, teeth grinding themselves dusty between lips snarling. Fourteen days, and in total, perhaps one full day's time gone to repose. He'd've thought it'd've been'd've thrice gone the effort to sleep with the lack of noisy frat boys whooping all hours of all nights, making him wonder in a thump of pillow over his head just how much it'd cost to rent out an entire wing to himself rather than just the room. But he hadn't and he doesn't, and there's no sense in the satchels beneath either eye and unrelenting creak to every cord for two weeks the straightest. But he has and he does, and he'd been savoring a dreamland made of cotton and Tchaikovsky when two shouts had sounded from across the hall, standing his nerves on their every ends to draw his fighter's instinct in a cyclical twist.

"-dude," hears he once he's set himself prim enough to allow the world's sight upon him. The bed is a  _mess_ beneath crossed jeaned legs- that's the first thing he takes note of. The second, that he's never so desired to squeeze someone until their tongue should loll so much as this someone, but in his sleep-clouded brain, it's hard to decipher the method he intends.

And then he's trapped beneath the disco ball of a nightclub, a 70s prom night that ends in Chamberlain decimated, navy greens in the glow of garish fuchsia, and he stands there long enough locked to them that it has the time to melt to violet. Togami glares, shreds himself gone down the corridor to find the bathroom, where now he stands, zipping his pants after quelling the angry stream of piss from his dick.

"Daring to wake me- the  _moron,"_ machine guns from him in a flick downward of fingertips to rid their cleanse. In the sink's mirror, he fusses with his jacket, his cuffs, swipes the dried saliva from his bottom lip in a fit of arm swung violent. A lanky brunette behind him obscures the reflection in his circle eyed gawking, ducks from the bathroom minus the soap visit when a glare whips over a shoulder as would a throwing star to pierce him. Togami looks to the mirror again, tilts his chin high, and stalks out proud well past permission.

His shoes meet neat the wood outside his dorm room. Hand to knob- though, he's tentative, for a life's first, ears honing toward the fracas to that still ajar opening.

"Admit it, Naegi, admit it!" The close fury it signals does not match the lilypad that is the next voice unto the world's pond; "Alright, alright! Maybe Tominaga Ai is a  _little_ hotter than Luke Skywalker, but not much."

Laughter, more of it, two fools slapping him into a head throb

The door take's Zeus' seize. When it again opens, the one facing has been closed a healthy ten hours, dragging him before bird songs to his first class. The lecture hall, when he finds his seat eight minutes before the bell (and he thinks it  _stupid_ there be such a juvenile overseer at all, and the only reason it's only  _stupid_ is because he's slept twenty minutes in a thousand hour day), is desolate to a close sixty percent. Togami scoffs. Parents who toil a lifetime's worth to force their DNA better off deserve more than the straggling laze-legged truants they've raised.

Then he's in a department store's aisle for blankets and bottles and coo-worthy booties, being tutted at in all the sweetest ways, because _he's not even out yet and you've already picked out a college?_

For that extra stolen eight minutes he spends the full lot in blink, blinkblink, blink- and wonders how sleep deprived a human brain must be to hallucinate. Contemplates deeper upon, once the lesson's begun with no time wasted in chatter of holidays, what kind of virus he's achieved for such a sizzling to meet the back of his throat.

"Damn, my piss's the color of a prescription bottle," is his ears' first catch upon rising the stairs. His fist tightens round the strap of his canvas bag. "We got any nips left in the fridge? I need t'hydrate."

Naturally, their paths  _of course_ must cross, an intersection en route to final flame. Togami pauses, not in deference, allowance, rather to capture all of himself in avoidance to the slightest stray lock gaining the vile brush against the stranger he wishes were still so strange in its foreign breath. It's nine to the sunrays kept, his mid afternoon and the other's midst of the night. And when Togami pauses, ribald incarnate mirrors it, blinking to him a moment before tilt goes to his skull.

"Mornin', neighbor," he greets. Cornflowers wrap round either pupil, matching the pinstripes on his boxer shorts that sunder prickly lengths of leg and a faded tee scrawled in bones. Togami bites back a quip to if he's ever seen him dressed, because that would imply another time he's been spotted close enough to notice. And there hasn't, and he's tired. Kuwata (that's his name, befitting such a mulberry field of a person, he thinks) prods the mingling hall light with his tongue's stud in a smirk all wicked.

Glare. Satchels. He swerves around the blockade, chin held a widened angle to neck in his stalk further doors down. The one opposite lives a clone to his dragrace partner, black tee and bedhead and blear strung eyes. He leans a head outward to aim for the source of the shout found prior, drawn upward by the magnetic click of knob across. Togami offers a lazy gaze over one shoulder.

Then he's being walked home after dinner by a cute boy, and he's slipping his hands in his pockets to keep their longing twitch concealed, and he's alone, no boys and no cuteness, not so wishing should be a linger to his lips in the morning to chase.

He blinks. When again his eyes open, it's four minutes past eleven on a Tuesday morning and the professor cannot even manage to be on time after two weeks' relief.

The needle kisses to his life's record grooves. He doesn't recall much of the time he's held prior, knows only studying, labor, knows only kicking in the teeth of those he climbs over for his throne. Togami Byakuya is gracious as he is a herald angel.

And he's tapping to the quiet waves of Presley and Anka, when the needle nips his earlobe frisky and the vinyl scratches to an all new tune. "Hey, can I sit here?"

 _Wise men say-_ "No." The answer comes before Togami's glanced at the speaker, though once he does, well-  _hah -_ he's only rarely grateful to his instinct. Faux fur caresses the gentle slopes of his face, one that puckers first before he's to smile timid in his bitty little crushable fingers to the empty chair back. He laughs as he sits, shrugs himself from the navy green parka, dragging the saturation from his irises with it. Togami wonders when he'd ever said anything worth the humor.

"I'm Naegi, you know, from across the hall," splits from the corner of his mouth. Though meeting of look further to him is denied, Togami can  _feel_ the one upon himself, and bears the burn holes to prove it. "I like your jacket. Green's my favorite color."

"Congratulations." His finger taps to lower the brightness of his laptop screen. The voyeur is busied in digging through the bag at his side, scuffling a while before he tugs a ringed notebook free to hit the tabletop. A pen rolls aside it. Sparkly. Purple.

It's all the willpower Togami has not to sever the other's metacarpals from his wrist.

Their teacher arrives upon the fourteenth minute past the hour, the twenty-second since his own and the ninth since this simpleton's sat in his conscience's saved seat, scribbling away the white of margins to Picassos along the borders.

Then he's- then he's right the fuck here in this Goddamned Calculus classroom, and he's taking notes and he's listening, and he doesn't recall anytime he's ever come home to candlelit dinners and lingeried men and  _happy anniversaries_ wisped hot against his neck.

"Ah," prods him in the middle of those notes, sometime later, between differentiating and integrating. "Do you have a pen I can borrow? Mine just died. Sorry, I'm probably being a bother, it's okay if you don't have-"

One side to his coat tears a wind toss opened, anything to clasp his incessant mouth, to violate the inner pocket that stores half his life. Wallet, kerchief, folded piece of manila paper he's never seen, black ballpoint.

Shadows crawl beneath his tipped lenses. He fingers the note freed to press it flat, scans the rows of looping revulsion.  _Hi, it's me, Nae-_

"Just what the hell kind of  _prank_  are you attempting to pull on me?" A dark haired girl glances from her computer screen a table over. Togami couldn't be flattered to give a damn.

Naegi perks up a centimeter taller in his spot, head turned puppydog sideways in questioning. The paper slaps the tabletop between them, to which he shifts his peering, eats away thirty seconds reading before his gleam dies to pale in nods of his stupid, stupid head.

"I didn't write this."

"It's your name. It's  _your_ handwriting," he insists, jabbing focus toward the glittering violet scratch along notebook lines.

Naegi blanches to close translucent. "Well...well maybe, b-but I didn't, I swear I didn't- and that last part's not by writing. It's way too neat."

The fine print is examined in a tug toward his face. Below the jarring bold warning of pure inanity, in a script so very pristine and so very heartclenching;  _not_   _possible._

Togami crumples the note in a fist.

"I don't know when, why, nor how," a close goes to his computer, shoved into its slot within his bag as it takes his shoulder, "and I will see to it that you meet the severe consequences of this."

"Togami, I swear to God, I didn't-!"


	16. Chapter 16

"Kyouko, I swear to God, I didn't."

Early evening's veneer is a cool smog in their presence. She's placed herself atop a top load washer, stagnant as all its clones, eyeing him as her stony reputation in his kilo long pontification. Delicate fingers pull a tee freed from the machine across her. It's a fresh hotness, clinging latent to the scent of lavender rain (and he can't stomach the scent of lavender, she knows, but it's all she'd had in her room on his forehead thumping  _ah, forgot my detergent)._ Her lashes bat quiet.

"Like, just- I don't even understand," he drones  _still_ on, folding the dark fabric to a square. "How could a note I wrote be in the pocket of some guy I've never even talked to. It had to be Kuwata or something- he's always messing with me like that."

In that same reticence of four hours drowned noon, she drops her boots down to floor, moves hands to assist. Naegi continues, "Or...maybe he was at that Halloween party, and something happened there? I got... _heh_ , pretty drunk, it's possible-" as she takes to the assembly line of flattening and folding each folded garment placed beside her.

The thick meat of jeans shake in his grasp, met at the middle, furl, furl. "It's just...weird, I-"

"Makoto," she hushes as she unfurls unfurls sunders at the middle, "Beg my input if you'd like it."

Then he's flushing hot at the dryer sheet clung to the boxers in his hold, palm through the hair and brows curved in his sheeply charm. "Oh, please, Kirigiri-heika, use your...masterful forensic skills to crack the case."

She glances to him briefly, takes the ones from his hands and compresses them. "I don't know."

His eyes roll into a sweetheart's groan.

"I do know," says she after a while of folding and of quiet, "that he likes men."

Naegi chokes on that same roll, burnt all over again in his refusal to meet her. Ten thousand degrees demand his tango in sync. "What's-What's that got to do with anything? How would you know, anyway? Jeez, Kyouko."

"Well, for one, I have eyes."

Scowl. Burn. "That doesn't answer my first question."

"No, but the tremble to your hands does," she tells him, and relieves the quaking their duty in thievery to another pair of slim denims.

The florescence flickers once above them. Naegi lays one to his forehead, steaming. "Come on, don't give me a hard time." A smirk runs file to the window bars of his mouth. "...He is pretty hot."

Pretty hot and rather callous, though he hates to allow a nasty first impression to monopolize the territory. And hardly does he have an impression at all, mere to themselves a misunderstanding still equally misunderstood, and all he cares now for is mending. Bandages up arms and clenching the heart to the beat of apology in beckoning. He isn't sure so what it is he'll wring penitence for, though that's his best solvent to such a stubborn metal mind as the demon of his daylight possesses. A stubborn mind, a stubborn heart, teeth of velvet as they nip his neck and make him shiver, the smell of fresh mint in the front seat of a Mercedes.

Interesting path of mind, he flushes against, but hasn't the time to dawdle in the alert that calls him forth. Kirigiri's standing there, grip full of denim and curious hand splayed forward.

"The note was tan colored, you said?"

He steps forward along star tips to spy it, the remnants damp of paper balled up in her palm, pocket of his jeans white and protruding from its home. The flecks, all shredded, all sepulchered now in lavender rain, sit in an array to split his lungs. Red ink splotches are visible  _just_ so on the minuscule pieces.


	17. Chapter 17

Togami wakes to shreds of paper outside his door.

He grinds them into the carpet beneath a heel, and continues on his trek to a morning class.


	18. Chapter 18

Girls who pass wonder frequently if that short guy ever stays in his own building.

He lays now to rumple blankets below him, eyes to the wood above in a defeat of the soul.

Kirigiri sits at her rolling desk chair, occupied by the hush of graphite over white lines. Orange honey is the skyline behind curtains sheer, is the twirl unto the tea she sips silent to her scrawling.

A shooting star goes over the horizon in Naegi's gazing high; it bears teeth gleaming to him, tied back hair dripping like forty Celsius chocolate in a peer downward to him.

"Didn't know you were still there," that star says to him, hopping on gold medal legs from the top bunk to crouch by his rolling pinned form. Her lips pucker in observation. He sighs, though smiles all the same do his words sing, "Hi, Asahina."

Tea sips. Stir. A hand pats his leg.

"What're you so quiet for? Normally I couldn't pay you to shut it." And it's goodnatured, sisterly, attempts only to work from him that palavering and joking alluded now to. Vain does it catch in her very own to see his head loll to face her, shrug lazy as the flakes that drift from the January night.

Again that pucker tightens. She bounces to a full stand. "Kyouko, what's wrong with Naegi? Did he and his freako roommate get into a fight or something?"

"Nothing like that," he answers in place of his evident babysitter, though she goes on despite it to say, "Lovesick," about the rim of her cup and continues on writing.

Never has he been so quick to refute, never has he been so sharply shot an arrow through buck's eyes in another's tongue lashing quick. " _Oooh!_ Naegi's got a crush on someone?" Wide blue eyes, that fit always more the doe than the hunter at all, they turn to him and that doe, fawn, reloaded bow, "Is it me? Because, thanks, sure, but I mean-"

"It's not you," he says, too late to soften harshness that breathes only offense in such a setting. "It's- It's not anybody. I don't have a crush, I'm just...thinking, that's all."

"Thinking about the tall guy in our Contemporary Social Studies class."  _Siiip._

Her ponytail slaps at such a whiplash of a glance behind a shoulder; the second half to that  _our._ "The blond guy, who sits in the back? Oh, come  _on,_ Naegi!  _Him?!"_

The flavor of it rests his denial to a back burner simmer instead to question, "...What's wrong about him?" and ignite her firecracker lips to a whipping.

"What's  _right_ about him?" Heavy at his side she perches down, fixes him in vulture's stares. "One time, I asked the teacher if we could go over this stupid American election thing from the nineties, not like I care but it was gonna be on the midterm, right? And he said- what'd he say, Kyouko? If I spent less time, like, uh-"

"If you spent less time stuffing your bra and more time studying, you wouldn't need to waste class time reviewing." Sip. Scribble.

Slice to wound freshened, her brow tug to the center. "Yeah!  _Jesus,_ the nerve of men sometimes, I can't stand it!"

He'd like to think he's any alibi in justifying it, though he finds himself focused more so on the comment's entree so near to him behind a tiny tank top, and- and his eyes flick back up to hers in a breathed chuckle anxiety strangled in every universe, scratches a finger to his cheek in a sit upward matching. "Well," and well  _what?_ Well, he's been thinking about the object of malice for the past hours straight edged, a hamster jogging to a summer bod through his head's wheel, and he cannot seem to escape the faintest connections; because, he'll think on an assignment due to be written an hour ago, and remember the note, think on the pangs in his guts and remember the finest raspberry liqueur drizzled atop ten-grand birthday cakes and twenty grand kisses twice the saccharine to pair, think on the sunset and remember the sweat of a beach he's never been to.

Lovesick.

He hopes it'll make him vomit; anything to relieve the nausea circling him as a quarter does a drain.

"I think you need a night out," calls him home, pointing his nose toward her, fallen now of all pique to draw two fists to match that determined grin. "To clear your head. We could all go to that ice cream place just off campus."

"Ah, I don't know."  _Of course_ he doesn't, because he's a Naegi and that's all they can manage. His fingers grip to kneecaps. "I don't really feel much like partying, or anything."

"Come on, Naegi! I'll even get Hagakure to drive us, he still owes me for getting him that keg for Mioda's party." To each sneaker she bounces forward back, extending to draw him up the same, eyes ever cunning in their coercing bright. "My treat. Strawberry? Matcha? Peanut butter cup? Mint chocolate  _chiiip?"_

Nausea shivs his side a further twisting, and though he does stands and her smile does blast, he hasn't but the strength to apologize in profuse hammers for his need to leave so sudden. A dual wave over a shoulder for a single return (and halfhearted at that) whisks him scapula to closed door in a breath, glides the corridors back across campus in an undue haste.

That pencil runs slowed to another line filled, and those sneakers kick off to run socks up ladder's rungs. Tea. Sip. "He likes salted caramel."

Asahina blinks down at her from the top bunk.

His own jaunt does him a capture of solace anew, desolate halls in the midweek's late. Though he'd fallen lax in his closest's wake, the crowd of more, of pressure and of thoughts pulled up from ice cracked- he's taken on too much, too much he cannot name a single item from, and he's perspiring a mess in a wintertime bite to think himself dragged by the ankles into such an overturned entrapment.

He's nervous in the first clicks to announce himself; not so for what lay beyond, but absolute in his good boy rep in a choke hold now, and the smoke that stains his hair upon the door's inward tug does null to soothe him.

_"Naegichi!"_

Because, when his roommate drops the prefix, and no caterwauls had hitched him through walls on the campus' mirror, then this is his last option.

(Because, when Kuwata is neither in their dorm room, or scant to calves over the shoulders, then he's bound to be in Hagakure's in hot pursuit of red glazed eyes and a crave for off brand chips.)

What Naegi does not expect, once he's a stuffed animal swinging by the shoulder in Hagakure Yasuhiro's thick claw of a hand to drag him inside, is to catch another's eye. A bed at the nearest side rests who he'd trailed, fragments to magnet, hunched forward in a cross of legs to focus only on the car speeding ten hundred miles per hour down the virtual streets controlled by his hand of God. He jabs hard the joystick. "Hey, Naegs. Joint's on the table."

Strings of curses bite his tongue to a crash sounded from the box television's speakers. Naegi switches to glancing over to said table, where, he's right, a blazing smoke rests waiting, but likewise has that  _eye_ aforementioned taken him. Joints (the untokable kind) halt.

"Sorry, sorry, Naegichi," excuses Hagakure from his spot at the table's other side. "I'm with a client right now, but help yourself to my humble abode as always."

He goes to return to his work, turns to face that stare that so refuses his, says, "Alrightio, Togamichi, where were we?"

Naegi watches on, mystified. Heat manifests to either side of his chiseled David's face, slow in his motions, thoughts over action.

The action he chooses is a sharp tug of chair from beneath him, legs long in their race to catch the door.


	19. Chapter 19

"Wait, Togami-!"

Of fucking  _course_ he's chased after- not that he'd lusted for it, anticipated merely. Naegi Makoto is the predictable type, he wishes he could think.

Regardless of predictions, those by nature and those stabbing him in mortification to have be caught begging, Togami's slung open the door to his liberation, pressing strict forward that face he refuses to admit the burn to, and he can  _feel_ the other one trailing,  _the other one-_ and he can hardly stomach that he's earned him a title so by instinct. Pitiful.

But hasn't he the time to rattle about it, as that liberation is barricaded newly by the stink of fresh black grease and bruised gums.

"The fuck outta my way," is his so hospitable greeting, dropped from lips he's ashamed so wholly must be glanced  _up_ at. He straightens at the shoulders, neck, pride, thins a twenty four caret glower to him.

"I-"

"The fuck's going on in here, some kinda Goddamn party?" blows out on the brute's shoulder past them. And he hates that at all there must exist a  _them_ , but its second half is angel's wings to carry them both to the hall in the slam that closes them solo just as their so adored most familiar voice prods, "Hell's up yours tonight, Oowada? Your boy scout wouldn't put out for y-?"

To silent exchange, agreement comes to ignore the shrill yelps from behind that slam.

"Um," Naegi tries, subtle, charming- "I think we should ta-"

"No." A flick moves his glasses into place. No, most certainly, he does not wish to  _talk_ about his  _feelings_ with Naegi Makoto, nor with anyone to ever before pose it. Though cricket chirps are that list preceding-

"Well, I just," Naegi  _tries,_ God does he try, scuffling shoe bottoms to hallway carpet, hands into blazer pockets. "I'm sorry, about everything. I still don't know how the note thing happened, but we can just drop it." Drops with it goes a sighing. "And- And I won't tell anyone about, y'know, this."

He needn't spare the nod toward where they'd departed most recent, as it's so jaw clenchingly obvious in the hot summer that ghosts still about Togami's cheekbones.

They're quiet a moment, as quiet as quiet can be with the shattering and savior's pleas that yowl behind them, and Togami takes to fingers at the lenses again in his furtherment; "...I just wanted to...confirm some suspicions I'd contemplated on."

He couldn't be so daft as to not spot the constellations that capture his expression. His own contorts to aversion.

"What sort of...contemplations?"

 _That I'm a Goddamned lunatic-_ "...That perhaps you and I have more of a connection than meets the eye."

Tilt. Lord strike them out equal now, sunder them forever more and- and for fuck's sake, could he allow himself a thought's completion without a cut off?! But this cut off's shoved to stumbling feet outside the dorm port, falters between the two to stand in a crouch. A headrush guides him to rise, knuckles packed to the flow from his nose.

"I'm gonna...go see what Maizono's up to..." mutters muffled the thigh tailed hound as he slinks past. Naegi blinks to his retreat.

"Um," try try try, "Do you...want to talk in my room?"

Deepest of blues reflect back in his lenses; his room's an aquarium for its luminescence on pitch, scorches the retinas and stuns the brain, for its glass sheet protecting from those who ogle in wishing. The lava lamp switches to a cherry pit blush, and its warm for that reason alone, surely.

He's refused a seat, and the other copies for politeness' sake, shifts weight in discomfort to stillness forth and back throughout.

"So...um..."

Togami's eyes roll.


	20. Chapter 20

He doesn't know what led to which; it'd started by saying no to ice cream and yes to a coveted smoke, to finding that another'd been none the same drawn forth by gods he doesn't believe in, and they'd talked, sure, and they'd watched Kuwata Leon drag himself down the hall and out the doors, and they'd talked more, sure, and perhaps somehow all of it trapped together to one capsule, one being, had in the slightest led to Togami Byakuya on his back beneath him, quivering in the delight of hazel green and aquarium blue, and Naegi Makoto is a rainbow in variegation, and he suddenly can place just where he's before tasted mint lip balm before, now.

They're kissing on his bed because, because he had said something about nothing, and Togami had said nothing about something, but he  _had,_ oh he had, in those fingertips that graze him sweet in his cerebrum, in eleven digits that lead nowhere and remembering a time he'd spent fascinated by all the stars and all their glory. Togami Byakuya is the brightest glint to end all, and he's only Togami Byakuya because Naegi can for no rationale sane recall a summer night in Sapporo watching red sails flicker and the fireworks snapping above, and Togami had told him how repulsive his Cadillac's upholstery had stunk after orange soda had been vomited up all over the front seat (because Naegi had strayed from the topic he'd known at all not, and had mentioned he likes lime sherbet, not the orange, because it reminds him of the time he drank so much orange soda he threw it up all over the car while driving along the Eshima Ohashi), and that somehow made his lips tingle and their eyes had locked and he's drug from all precedents now by the hands gliding to squeeze thighs' backs.

He's winded in a thousand ways when he's to tug split that kiss in a graham cracker snap.

"You put the note in your pocket," he says.

And Togami's just so delicious in his muss haired fogged lensed stupor below his gaze. "I know," melts those contusions of ardor, "The spirits informed me."

Naegi snorts that mild scoffing laugh, permits so those fingers the move to his nape to guide him downward all over again, and they're kissing, touching, and Naegi wishes he owned a tie to keep the doorknob warm. Adolescent libido, or could just mildly it be that he's not in the category, has lived a millennia of coffee in the morning and pain in the lower back, rings to his finger and cries to ruin his sleep.

He gains a posture to his straddle at the other's waist, peers down to him. His shift all slight is that other's breathless gnawing, but Naegi hasn't the gall to play games, meek in his hindrance mellow in his gold.

"I got an eighty one on my English final," is what he says, and what he does, the thinnest layer gone lost to bare himself.

Togami Byakuya is too alluring in his spreading smirk to deny.


	21. Chapter 21

He'd only agreed to a talk, because his head had been burnt up in pondering for days endless. He'd only agreed to a...naughty college age evening special, because he's been eyeing his handsome across the hall neighbor since the year's beginning. And the nasty fact of the tent at his crotch tall enough to camp beneath, but he decides he needn't share that bit.

They're laying in flush of skin, face to his shoulder's crook breathing softest hush, fingers running to his chest's flat; memorizing each contour his prints should trail upon. Low lit eyes pierce the ceiling only.

"The back of the note," he starts, and the touch along his grooves slows to stilled, and a look drags up his throat, jaw. "It was half an advertisement, for a park concert in Hokkaido. In three years."

Very much he  _feels_ that blink of eyes in a room so dulled, light sipped from the sole source glown forest. "Wow...you really plan ahead."

His own glaze is that of fatigue too deep;  _Makoto._ it says, in that period at the end type way. The recipient accepts it, clenches at the shoulders, fingers his bottom lip idle.

"...In Odori Park, right?" A laugh, elk's laps. "Me and Kuwata wanna go to the one this summer. I thought it looked really  _really_ fun, I'm not sure why."

Togami, for all his glamour, glory, tinges in tentative meld. "...I somehow recall a blanket in the grass and five hours of you and your sister headbanging to idol music." Cigar smoke is his wisp, one that cannot for all sakes befall to detesting.

It jaunts through the other a while, picking the corners to understanding in optimism. "You remember...something in the future?"

"Makoto.," he tightens. "It isn't the future; it's our past. Did you not understand the hour's worth of explaining?"

"Well, the blood flow is kinda still trying to get back to my brain." He takes a wince to good humor. The blanket tugs a notch higher. "And, I mean...this isn't the easiest thing to swallow, you know."

"I know," snaps he back, grimacing, "It's too much at once, and neither of us have any reason to believe it at all. To be frank, I'm not sure I even do."

And Naegi, the vagrant to wit, says in a chin rested to knuckles rested to pectoral, "So...why'd you just halfway sleep with me, then?"

Had he the collar, it'd be tugged a choke now, but Togami settles instead to strangle him by glare sole, steps past the dust swept neath carpet to splinter off. "You push me further from acceptance with each breath."

"Well- hey, I'm not the one who-"

"Oh, don't start with that," he's quick to clip in. "It's always he said she said with you, Makoto-  _Christ,_ every disagreement with you is like a court trial. I don't need the play by play, I've been here the whole time." To his waist the duvet manifests once he's sat straight backed in time to the other taking haunches. "I'm the one who put the note in my pocket, I'm the one- for  _whatever reason -_ fell in love with you, and now we're here, and all I can think about is how sexy you looked in a suit at our wedding that I wasn't even  _at,_ so I think I've gone rather fucking insane, there's your Goddamned play by play."

He'd watch him had he the gusto to unclench his molars, unfold from themselves those arms over chest. It's stupid, and everything's gone too fast too changing by the snap of thumb to middle, too fast too fast too stupid but if he didn't want to be here, he'd leave, would he not, could he not? He'd leave, surely, and he'd watch had he the gusto, but he needn't be anyone's viewer at all, because the stage play's reached a hand out to crawl over his neck's heat, draws forward their forms to be one at the forehead.

"...Just say it now," Togami says to the delicate, delicate hazel stardrops that pin him so gauche, "Say I talk too much. Say I never listen, I don't care."

Delicate, delicate fingers shift just the most mild, set his flesh ablaze fresh, burning a fever raging to spread at twinned touch. Naegi does hardly inch that way nor this, at once total the slimmest dusting of rose across the full night.

"Byakuya," angel's wings mouth to him, and those stardrops fall lain where his own comets refuse, "I don't think we're married yet." Fever, fever, hands to nape foreheads touching, dark soft night to the smell of affection through cinder's after rain prism glint. "...But I hope we make it to that concert."

_Like a river flows, surely to the- surely to the- surely to the- surely to th-_


	22. Chapter 22

"Ah, you really don't have it?"

Hardly is it even a  _store_ with dignity in tact to have deemed it so; a shop, a corner vendor who'd gotten a lucky break and a hundred square feet to stuff his books about. Devastation scans across them all another sweep, allured by the catching colors that kiss his brain into drinking them all in each the same second. None strike him so as to paint a pleasure over, though, and he turns back to the front counter to pout a lip downward.

The gargoyle tending to him drops lazy eyes to his shuddering frame a foot below. "It's the most popular manga of the summer, kid, I don't know what t'tell ya. Try Tsutaya."

Into himself he draws a fraction closer. He hasn't the time to heed any advice- he's got ten minutes to lunchtime ending, and a twelve minute walk to his dormitory. A wave to his hand is a thank you's brother, and he'd like there to stand one finger without its four matches, like to spit that he's fifteen fresh years old, not some  _kid,_ and then he remembers he's in a comic store searching for a picture book about magic and world saving, so he allows the exiting bell to do the talking for him.

His thighs are chaffed by the time he returns to campus the following ninth minute, slid self to seat in a flurry of lapels shrugged straight and mid July sweat flicked from forehead. Five more days, he tells himself, eyes shifting rightways to intake the flow of students into the class room.

Humidity runs fingers through the hair of all the pretty girls who trounce in. Anew a sweat takes him twice the strength of a summertime jog had to leer upon their low buttons and short skirts.

"Could somebody open a damn  _window?"_ begs the panting primadonna on her way to a seat. Behind her suffering blonde curls follow more manicures fanning faces, and Naegi has to wonder how the one stony eyed straight banged girl doesn't lose it in her leather to the wrists and dense cords of hair (that he'd just kill a man to pet, but that's a separate issue for a separate time), but has his attention split centered. Once her seat's been taken, long legs crossed to face the board two spots from himself, another places herself to the spot between, groaning within the wool of her socks.

"It's too  _hooot,"_ Maizono Sayaka grips his heart with this afternoon, puffing her lips to a weighted blow outward. A black ribbon adorns either fashionably messy cobalt twinbun. When she turns to him, he's drenched in more than hairline or underarms, sea glass blue glimmering off that sunshine so abhorred now. "I can't dance in this weather, I can hardly sit still without sweating." Fingers go to swipe beneath her bangs, tongue lolling thick to spout  _yuck._

Naegi offers a chortle in condolence, tells her in a prattling best friend way, "At least you get to wear a skirt. I think these pants are stuck to me forever."

Again that  _yuck,_ again that tuck into oneself; talking about your sweaty ass is a good way to flirt with a pop sensation, no? His head shakes, temples dripping steady, worsened in the pack of sixteen into one square room, worsened in the clack of heels to tile that forces them all to rise and bow and sit again, cranes' beaks to glassed pond.

Chalk. Graphite. Perspiring.

The teacher bows, and they await the next.

Five more days.

"Yo, Naegi," broadens his lids. The newcomer clears the path of the one by his side so natural, taking a final gush in disgust to move instead in chatter forced upon that leather wrist dense hair holier than thou all around. Her abandoned chair is captured to flip, squat, rest forearms to the back. "Didn't see you in the courtyard at lunch, you ditch?"

Silver gleams all about him. At either underarm rests a discolored patch, sleeves shoved as high as biceps will allow in desperation to placate.

"Ah, no, nothing like that, Kuwata," Naegi tells him, shy to tremble either lip into syllables. "I just-"

"Naegichi ditched campus?" Honey bear pupils lick him fresh. He pales.

"No, no, I-!"

"Yep," Kuwata cuts in with a skin crawlingly wet palm to his mouth. His eyes walk along the stragglers forming in his wake. "Strolled his fancy ass right off into the city."

"What's this about ditchin'?" Heavy boots shake the foundation. One lifts to rest at the emptied chair afront him, elbow leaned to raised knee and wide finger taunting. "You hit up that new part shop on 21st?"

"No way," silences the muffed mortification behind a chloroform palm. "Bet he went to that video store, XXX Corner."

"They have a  _delightful_ hentai section, eh, Naegidono?  _E_ _heh-"_

"Hentai? Isn't that the shirts with, like, the hippie colors-?"

_"Ditching campus?!"_

"Ah, here we fuckin' go-"

"Leaving school grounds without written permission is prohibited under section one-zero-six of the student handbook. See here, it states clearly-!"

"Would you stuff it, eyebrow face? Goddamn, you need a Xan. Or to get laid-  _hah,_ I'm sure Oowada's takin' care of that one though-  _ay!_ Hands off me, pompadour!"

_"Physical violence is prohibited under section eight-four-!"_

And Naegi doesn't catch the rest, can't care to from such a proximity as the exterior, but he knows the hall's tile is cool in combat of such sear. His knuckle tugs loosened a scarlet chokehold, stealing steps two at once to work his way to any destination he's to manage.

He thinks minutely that a trip to the infirmary would do him well, and he'd need not a wild excuse for the amount of heatstroke cases surely limping their way down this week. He thinks minutely that he'd ought to just go back to class, slink bewtixt hands rattling at his expense to take his seat and scribble another session of doodles in his notebook.

The settlement values his slow tapped walk through the school's vast second floor library, curling fingertips about shelves' dust. A hopefulness alights him to think the novella he's been in search of for the week past days now could have been stocked here, in the ever bragged state of the art, up to date, most spanktastic library in all of east Asia. Low lights draw his shadow along the floor, a dance of one arm lifted, two lips pursed.

Around him, the smell of age is powerful, the dimness about strengthening the lull. He's cautious to tread slowly, callused by the fear of disrupting another (of which none reside, even) or shattering the rule calling for silence. A row of bright hued spines draw his focus, stepping forth to greet them.

It'd be a great help had his foot not caught upon the long drawn extension cord across the tiling, had he not planted an inch from face first in a catch of hands beneath him that save his teeth so near the tips of his hair still flounce. Stunned is he a long moment, in a stupor clung by cacophony and a life flashing before either eye. The savior palms attempt a lifting, and it is then he's dropped chest to floor in an  _oof_ that tells him a summer break resolution should be less Playstation more preacher bench, but unravels himself from the tripwire to crawl to feet in the side table's anchoring assistance. A heavy breath, and now would be the time for the infirmary trip, he thinks, what with the way his kneecaps ache so, though in the moments following perhaps more for the mania igniting his flesh.

He hadn't thought far enough ahead to understand that extension cords lead to objects and objects lead to falling in a smashing clunk to the ground should their cords be yanked at. Sharp green boggles to wrap fingers about the neck of the desk lamp, blanching at the cracked eggshell of a bulb in its maw.

The best course of action- waiting for its owner to return, apologize voluminously, offer banknotes for replacement.

Naegi Makoto's course of action- set the lamp back to its spot after a whispered bowing condolence to it, and flying in a u-turn back along the hallway.

An honor, surely.


	23. Chapter 23

"What sort of run down low budget  _shithole_ of a  _book_ store are you running that doesn't sell  _books?_ "

He's throttled by the pinch of an interior. His closets triple the size of this pathetic excuse for a shop.

Dull eyes meet his fiery, blinking bored forward to a question that suffers not from lack of answer. "We sell books, guy. Just not...Zading's Destiny. Try Tsutaya."

" _Zadig ou la Destinée,"_ tuts he in a mocking, an eye roll, a scoff. Hands tug at either lapel, twisting himself about to collect his haughty exit. Never has he been treated in such diffidence as that long nosed bowl cutted freak behind the counter, and he's only remembered anything about such an insignificance to be sure to describe the correct person when filing scathing complaint later on. For now, he's a curfew to meet within the next fifteen minutes, and though he's a brisk six minute walk to regain campus beneath his soles, he's a sucker for promptness in all that he is.

His yank goes to the door handle, slapping the top bell into a church choir frenzy, a juxtapositioned silence taking himself in his stare forward.

"Oh-!" The wet rat pipes up to him, simper curling mouth. "Thank you."

He recognizes him, those eyes, those hands, each cow's lick fawning over his scalp. It's yet another nobody from class seventy eight, and Togami would be just delighted to kick his teeth in and demand a bill paid for shoe shining. He settles for a shove past, stepping into the ass spanking heat of the mid year, never admitting its looming power over him in his unvarieted season-round attire.

Not a single droplet has caressed him on his return, folding long sleeves unto one another in a wait for their teacher's approach. Heavy breath falls sick to his neck.

The class period begins as perpetually tedious as it ends, finishing off a strand of a sentence before clicking, tucking, closing the hardcover notebook to his desk.

Breath. Neck. Sick.

"I-I didn't see you at  _luuunch_ , Byakuya," taps at his shoulder.

His mouth sneers, gaze going the most subtle hint longways at the motion gathering at a window corner. They flick back straight.

"Forgive me, I couldn't breathe any longer in the cloud of cat shit constantly around me." A cuff adjusts to his wrist, expression refined in stone as she takes to muttering on about the disgusting race that is teenagers and their lacking hygiene. Exhale, thick, dragging eyes along the likes of them all in the room surrounding. Coats slung to chair backs, cleavage glistening in the roaming sun, bangs pinned from faces in curving bobby pins. The delinquents in the far corner seem to engage in a contest of who can be the most vexing in the shortest amount of time. Were he a judge, he'd name victor to the redheaded result of failed contraceptives, waving guffaws about fragrant. It's near sexual gratification to watch him be lifted from his feet by the front of his uniform, shook about in a rattle of skull by the gripping hands of fire upon him. More shouting, more cheering. Togami folds one leg over the other in time to the punk being tossed down to the soft landing of the rat faced butterball behind him.

"Fukawa," Togami says, mower to her grass blade palavering, "I need you to get me a book."

Instantly, whatever it had been she'd been spitting up dies out to clasp palms and lean so forward her desk runs with her. "Anything, anything! What book, dearest?! Nonfiction? Murder mystery? A-A steamy  _romaaance_ novel?"

His glasses push into perfected place, and the glance behind them goes to the truant slipped from the doorway's crack. His jaw tilts, and he'd recognize the tender glass green had he been met with them this time around.

" _Va Te Faire Enculer,"_ he says as their next teacher enters, fifteen heads dipping to notebooks, one sated grin dripping in the saliva of a task appointed so sweet.

Algebra is an utter bore, not to sound just  _oh so_ teenagery, but he's known how to graph inequalities since before most could zip their own coats, and ten solid minutes of notes on it do him less a good review and more a new name to his eventual hitlist. Another in that list's midst jerks the door the slightest nudge in his entry, fifteen heads lifting from notebooks to peer toward him, face gaining flush well past afternoon warmth.

"Late again, Naegi?" admonishes their professor in a tongue to cheek, earns a deep bow toward her.

"Ah, I'm sorry," the newcomer spins en route to his seat. "I was in-in the bathroom."

"You got the trots again, Naegs?" hears he all the way from his seat in the front corner, hears everyone in the classroom because that pit stained redhead would lose in a whispering contest to a megaphoned auctioneer. The hand blocking lip readers drops in rings' clinks to desktop, and from that very front corner peripheral Togami can see the sear to the unpunctual's face to the sniggering fluttered like confetti about.

The teacher stands straight backed in a purse of her dried lips. "Open your books to page three hundred nine, and read quietly, please."

Togami opens his book to page two fifty one, palms his chin and stares blear toward the wall. It does click to him in brooding's midst that the focal point to the class' jeers this morning is the same address he's to mail that polish bill to, and perhaps in the parcel too a stick of deodorant and a guidebook on how to avoid being such an utter fuckup.

Their release to their own dorm rooms at the day's end is a relief that battles any stickier. His eyes are sore and tarnished to a rub behind lenses, slipping them to nightstand in the same motion of a back lain to comforter top, hands folded as one out for viewing. The hours preceding had tied him to frustration, and though he's rare to sip relaxation's salted rim, he thinks he's a boss enough the full world to grant it every so often.

Cap toed Vuittons are pulled to steps not four minutes later, to the knob jingling, claws scraping wood.

 _"Byakuya!"_ shouts frantic, muted through the door,  _"I-It's an emergency!"_

His fingers twist the lock on the handle. He goes to turn back to his rest when a hesitance halts him at the shoulder.

 _"I was in the library, l-looking for your book. Some-S-Someone broke your lamp! We n-need to f-_ eep!"

A sudden glare down to her in the break in her meltdown, and all the same the flame that melts her whole. Steamed silver eyes take on some mushy gushy bullshit he hasn't the time for. "Y-You look ravishing tonight, Byakuya-"

"What about my lamp?" He blinks downward to the wring of her fingers about dark metal, and he's careful not to contact skin to skin in his thieving of it in a snatch. The end peers upward to him, faded to wonderland indefinition in his realization as to his watcher's excessive mess of a blushing face; it's a swift one two in and out, and he's at the doorway again, eyes placed back to their white-rimmed mansion to examine the disgrace further. He sneers. "Bastards. It figures, the single day I choose to leave my belongings behind is the single day some buffoon decides to learn how to read."

The time's cruised to smoky maroon when he approaches the cafeteria. A dozen upperclassmen (a term he uses in describing age alone) line along the table to his immediacy, slinking past the brunette with her mouth stuffed around rowdy hollers and the hunk arguing tough at her side to reach nearer his own grade's section. Hardly any less is this side's dinner a hellfest; the madman in the high collar's shouting over the head of the mousy haired teary eyed twink seated beside him, joined in on whatever argument he'd just swerved around. Someone shouts something about a pull up competition. Rice flies from the studded mouth of the cone headed punk at the sophomore table, and Togami recalls roughly eleven instances in which meals have ended in her jump atop to bellow nonsense.

He doesn't often join his class for dinner.

At his side, he feels a clinging, fingers clenching his pristine jacket out of cowering. In every last eyedropper's beat of disgust, he swings his arm hard enough to separate tissue from bone in his freedom found. Fukawa stumbles into the lap of a rocker at the bench closest, mouth as loud as it had been in the early afternoon. "Hey there, sexy thang. Come to take a ride on the Kuwata express?"

There's a hooting laugh from the pompadoured fellow, having taken a break from his cross the room screaming match, at the slap that lights his face to pinkened still even once the lap warmer's bolted off in deep carmine humiliation.

"Man, it's hot as a fart out there," is the next sound to cut through the horror show Togami watches upon. Two large hands set down the grip of paper bags to the table, bottoms smothered in grease that delights the eyes and guts of a dozen teenagers in tandem.

"You're the shit, Hagakure," Kuwata yowls in a tearing open of cellophone. Bun is pulled open, peels away a pickle from the top and drops it into his mouth. A fist rattles silverware when it smashes the tabletop.

"Why d'ya always have to eat your burgers like a Goddamn lunatic, Kuwata? I can't look at that shit!" pompadour gripes, sending Togami's own thoughts into classless action. His mouth stuffs with meat and cheese as he spits, "I'd rather watch Yamada drink fifty Cokes in a sittin' than you sucking down onions like that."

A noisy guzzling from straw to cup bottom cuts through the static about them, leads to a low scowl from the yankii and an elbow to his squishy middle. Cola coughs up from his gag and rush to push tinted glasses back into place.

"I ever tell you guys about the time my burger got abducted?"

"Not that shit again, Hagakure."

"Yeah, well," Kuwata begins, carrying forth the mainstream discussion, "Ain't as gross as watching Naegi dip his fries in his shake. Look at the little bastard- ever hearda  _ketchup?"_

The spotlight turns then to the little bastard direct across from the accuser; his drink cover rests splayed to allow those dips within. A french fry is held in purgatory, halfway to his waiting mouth and dripping vanilla. The destination goes clamped, sitting straighter in his hot faced glancing.

"Leave him alone, Kuwata," pipes up the blue eyed bombshell at his side, the only girl of their class to join the common table for dinner (save for, perhaps, that mousy teary one Togami has yet to strip of ambiguity). Chopsticks delve into her classy waist watching bento. "I think it's cute."

"Yeah, and I think you're cute, but you still won't let me dip my fry in your milkshake." Ketchup borders the spewing mouth that guffaws at his own joke, joined by none but a chorus all the same.

Togami doesn't remember why the fuck he's standing in the middle of all this, but he does remember that the girl in the far corner of the cafeteria is named Kirigiri Kyouko, the headmaster's precious daughter, walking unnoticed to the kitchen in the back with emptied tea cup in hand. Their glances are millimeters from matching up, blocked by the stroll between of a trio of third years, thick hipped girl in the middle noisy as all hell in her chattering to the tall blond on one arm and the mask mouthed panic attack dragged along beside her. Togami thinks she hasn't brushed her hair since the day it sprung from the roots. Togami thinks he's getting off topic.

His throat clears in a hot  _mhmh,_ attention granted from several meeker, and the boisterous catch on in following the dead stares past. From just before himself, Kuwata swivels, running eyes up lengths of legs, torso, glower.

"Hey, Togami, got any weed?" he grins, and this joke  _does_  earn coughed amusement, the butt of it stiffening a deadbolt.

"Hello, Kuwata, have any cocks to go suck?" He cares not for the raucous laughter that beats his skull clean, rather only to the task at hand now. Along the table he glances, finds each expression settled either in that bemusement, or sheer curiosity alone to his presence (or the gruff frown of having been bested so), but lands his daggers upon the sorest thumb.

Sweat clings down the round jawline of the babyface he aims his ire at. Lips quiver.

"Naegi," rips from him, a sudden declaration, a sudden recollection to what he'd known not. The lamp, still heavy in his grasp, lifts. "You're a poor fool to mess with me."

"I'm sorry," he spills so  _immediately_ it's near gratifying. A rushed bow forward thunks his forehead to the table, leaning back into the rubbing of it. One eye squints to his pained wince. "I'm sorry, I tripped over the cord, it was an accident."

"Yes, as I'm sure you can relate." Its base slams down to a placement as to allow his arms' fold. "Pay me for a new bulb."

Naegi goes to an instant nod, elbow lifting to reach in a pocket where its promptly stopped by a hand, and the pouty popstar beside him says, "Hold on, Naegi, that isn't fair. You didn't do it on purpose."

"Yeah, uhh," begins pompadour in eloquence, reaching for the fries of the chubby one beside him and stuffing a handful in his teeth, "ain't ya, like, loaded, anyway? What's one lightbulb, fifty yen?"

Togami swelters beneath the tanning bed of the collective grousing that rains to him. The spotlight is no place for a king to stand shamed, he knows, tilts his chin high and his tone low.

"This is the business of no one but Naegi and myself. Find your own conversations to spew bullshit into."

"Then," and of course there's a  _then,_ and of course it's Kuwata Leon who gives it, "why'd ya make a big fuss in front of everybody, if you didn't want the attention?"

Shivers wrack him in the apoplectic melody so frequent through his eardrums. Speech tempts his parting lips, stolen sight cross to the cupped mouth shout from a table over.

"Hey, Togami- _chaaan_! Join our pull up contest!"

"Yeah, even a scrawny fag like you could beat Oowada!"

Weighted boots drop from their raised place, trouncing off in a,  _"The fuck you say, Kazu-bitchi?!"_

For once his fame's a ruin to him, folded in still to himself as he snaps back his focus upon the remaining bits of seventy eight. He catches the epilogue to that girl and her tied back waves of ocean salt whispering behind a palm into her hip partner's ear, pulls away to fan that hand in a giggling that the other manages weakly to mirror.

"And just what the  _hell_  is this? _"_ Their humor stalls to his accusing point trained forth. "The courage to mock someone aeons ahead of your worth? Have you nothing better to do than gossip on like the mucus mouthed schoolchildren you are?"

And,  _oh,_ sweet sweet Maizono nods into her smile. "Yep!"

And,  _oh-_...oh? Maizono. He's heard it somewhere, somewhere other than an unfortunate roster arrangement (his reasoning, always, for knowing at all the lives around him), somewhere scrawled over CD covers, somewhere in lips praying knelt for her concert's tickets to be received the coming February's fifth morning.

He hopes to never hear it ever fucking again, if this acerbic taste of her personality accounts for its overall flavor.

"How distinguished," he says to scornful chime. "Though I'd expect nothing less of you. It doesn't take any sort of brains to march around on stage shaking your ass and shrieking out lyrics you didn't write."

To her dropped jaw, two palms hit the table in a push upwards to rising. Kuwata's facing him in a nasty gang boy sneer, chest puffed a robin's and chirping the same. "What, you get off picking on girls or somethin'?"

"Cut it out, Kuwata," his defended damsel says from her seat. Togami glances to her, to the one beside her in white jawed shock to watch the show before him. Sitting there, blank, condensation to palm from chilled drink cup, drip, drip, gawk.

He smirks.

"Yes, cut it out,  _Kuwata,_ I wouldn't want you to strain yourself too hard and jump start puberty."

Choler runs its nails along his sides. Inevitable- a fist raises. "I'll rough you up good if you open that snooty mouth of yours again, bitchstain."

"Fight?!" someone says from the second year group. And they're teenagers, so, naturally, everyone whiplashes their sights to the source.

"Yo, fuck 'em up, Togami!"

"Alright, Kuwata, that prick had it coming!"

"Yeah, raw dog him!"

"Uh, Owari, I'm not sure you used that term correctly-"

"Fuck him  _up,_ fuck him  _up,_ fuck h-!"

The restless tenor, the chanting, the ogling- it all drives Togami mad with divinity. Not that he's any intention to partake in such a slaughtering of chivalry, but he says, "Go on," because it's all a game, and he'll win through allure alone, glory. "Fuck me up."

He  _hears_ the thickness to Kuwata's swallow, pins it for intimidation, and how  _delectable_  that is. His tongue runs over his top teeth, arms never leaving their fold, sanctimonious gleam never leaving his glare downward. Kuwata's fist draws back. Togami breathes in, delighted.

"Hey," cuts off that bliss, halts that fist from swinging, noses from bleeding detentions from gifting, and Togami and all the other highschoolers in the room pick up and dust off their eyeballs to point them toward the new pinnacle, a lighthouse standing atop the freshman table in null but proverbial egg on the face. Naegi Makoto's standing atop the freshman table, arms wide to a crucified mortal, way made to glance direction unto the darkness surrounding his khakied crotch. "I, uh...I pissed myself,  _ha."_

Wide mouths wide eyes wide gaping mortification. It's silent a long while, fists dropped as do senses, breaths hardly dared to be stolen.

Then the laughter begins, because they're  _teenagers,_ and some dinky little nobody's standing on the table with soaked thighs and a face dark as fine cherrywood molding.

Justice could never served in the mere description of Togami's intense, throbbing disgust. He carries himself as regal as he is into a vast step over Kuwata's doubled on the floor tears at eyes' corners form, carries himself out the door swift and haughty. It takes him a straight knee traipse through the hall to recover from his humiliation, and another trounce through to the dorm hall to unravel why it is at all he's felt it. Second hand? Empathy? Not in the slightest. A red string about his finger too taut not to suffocate? ...Never.

Hands adjust his jacket, slick his hair smoothed, and he'd still walk with his head held so high had there been no other shadow swallow the flooring by his door.

She's leant there, to the wall, to his personal space, just  _observing_ his movements as one would neurologist to lab rat. And he quite quite quite despises the feel of being looked down upon so, even if he's to spare half a foot to spot her hair's crest- but it doesn't tie into the grand scheme, and he's standing in arms crossed one toetip a compass point outward, and she's walking her devil's advocate pupils all up his crawling skin.

"Your car didn't break down," Kirigiri Kyouko, the headmaster's precious scapegrace, says to him.

His fix upon her is nonplus, beating the disgrace to citrus pulp with those taunting flicks.

"Have you gotten lost? The infirmary's on the other side. I'm sure they've a remedy for batshit insanity somewhere."

Heels lift her delicate, posture pulled immaculate in her hair over the shoulder twist of the waist exit like the perfect self righteous bitch he takes her for. And it's  _rude-_ the trespassing, the thick of her lids never once implying interest, reverence. Tactless enough to drown him to a waterlogged memory, uncouth the equal beat to drain it cleared.

Closed goes his box in solitude, a heavy prone fall to the plush of comforter.

He doesn't often join his class for dinner.


	24. Chapter 24

Never the dramatic, yet he cannot recall a time in which he'd held a full day of peace at Hope's Peak Academy.

There'd been the first day, where he'd entered the classroom in palms asweat and heart racing in anticipation, and a gruff ridden blond had asked just what the  _fuck_ he was doing in the second year room. There'd been that  _hell_ of a time before that, though it hadn't occurred at the school, merely resulted in his enrollment, but he'll count it anyway. And- there'd been  _today,_ but he'd rather think of  _anything_ else on his stiff legged trip back to his room.

The attempted retrace is much of a she said he said as any intellectual method, recalling point to point  _hey, who's up for a McDonald's run?- ever heard of ketchup?- you're a poor fool to mess with me- you know what they say, Naegi, boys always pick on whoever they have a crush on, mhmhmh- and just what the hell is this?- hey, i pissed myself, haha-_

From a steamed sit to his bed, he plucks Maizono's creed out by the fingertips, remembers to the fall of hot face to palms her nose crinkled peek toward him pulling the cover from his paper water cup, clamoring to plant feet out of the way of meals in wide arms signaling his rise. His teeth had chattered in the shiver of ice staining his crotch, but he's a man of action where his words would assuredly fail, field mouse to hawks' glowstick deep bass rager.

He's a man of action where is concerns his tall blond handsome classmates, most evidently, and saving them from the  _in_ evitable droplets of shame meeting the droplets from nostrils. First hand, he'd know, and even Oowada's since apology hadn't been able to thieve back the jarring yowls of a dozen spectators. Something in him says it was only his empathy. Something in him says Togami Byakuya wears Burberry Brit.

And it isn't the first undoing of tight spiraled cord- the first had been the tall blond handsome classmate of his spotted at the corner bookstore on his entrance. A sort of spice had tingled to his lips around his greeting, feeble beneath those eyes, similar in their rolling hearth as the ones that pin him so pretty on starry seventh evenings, and he'd told him he can't look at what he'd been writing or it wouldn't come true, and he'd been told right back that it wasn't the paper being gazed at, smearing warmth's shade along the zygomata. Reality had slapped him freshly then, and looking up to empty air where had stood that peering peer, entering the shop to a shake of the head.

There had bred his desperation to play noble wet crotched savior.

Naegi frowns hotly to himself, carries that weight all through the skipping of breakfast, first block Geography (where he's caught amidst blank window watching to the long pointer's smack upon Poland and his rush to name it Egypt), excuses thrown of being poolside rather than attending their morning class meal. He'd expected the licking to come from their hall monitor in his sword up the ass regime, though rather had himself whipped fresh by the short curvy girl from the backrow, where'd she'd broken a shout through the ragtag boy group's conversation to insist against swimming on an empty stomach. Between class breaktime finds him still stuffing his mouth in the pastries she'd forced upon him, and he'd thanked her so profusely in his polite incapabilities that Yamada had leant over his desk to show him a latest sketch. The bearclaw in his mouth gags him to attention caught over his way, and Kuwata's turned in a tornado swivel to thump his back a near splintering of vertebrae, then given up all focus to grin fat and golden at the paper he snatches from the sweating fingers displaying it.

"You and Asahina look good together, Naegs!" bellows he, leads a snorting laugh. His elbow scuffs the bicep aside him. "Hey, Oowada, check out the newest hot couple."

"No, wait-"

"What do I care? Not like Naegi could get pussy anyway," says the other back, returns to his chatter with the honey eyed doe at his side.

Naegi could just faint in the humiliation of it all.

Merely another day at Hope's Peak.

The drawing's plucked from above, crinkling in hands on either side that have never a day meant malice to examine it. "Whoa, this art's real good," Hagakure says. "I could never draw kissin' like that. And the way Naegichi's got his hand on her-"

"Hagakure,  _please,"_ melts miserable from the muse, sinking in his seat to a stuff of hands over face. "I don't want anybody else seeing that."

"I'll have you know, Naegidono, my art skills-"

"I-I know, Yamada, it's a great drawing, I just-"

"Ah, perhaps you'd rather an edit?" says the artist to a claim of the paper back. It's not a full minute of erasing, glancing, sketching, before it faxes off to new hands with a smug fold of his own. Naegi peers to it, gawks in a choke this time of air alone.

Looming over a shoulder, Kuwata's cheeks fill with an inhale, darkening to his suppressed sputter of lips.

"Hey," Hagakure trains a point downward, easy humor gliding his tone. "Is that Togamichi?"

That inhale rockets outward in a clunk of forehead to desk, fist slapping aside it. Naegi burns.

He tilts an agony over the paper's edge. "Yamada, I-"

"Gentlemen, I will have to ask to you to lower your voices," comes between the gawking and the shouting and the good times. "Even I admit to enjoying a good joke now and again, but it is irresponsible of you all to-"

"Hey, eyebrows, wanna see somethin' too hot for TV?"

"Kuwata,  _don't-"_

Pinpricks are his pupils to the widening around them, gripping neat the paper handed over to him, hard bone shoulders shivering to the energy taking him on. The easy smile that had been painted rare upon him drops in an impressive volatile instant.

_"Pornographic images have no place in the classroom, Naegi!"_

Forehead to desk fist aside howling laughter all attention on them them them heat and hot and oh  _good fucking GOD-_ "It's- it's not mine, Ishimaru, I didn't draw it!"

For all that attention, the picture is flipped opposite to intake, gesturing fingers about in demonstration. His expression silks rage. "This is an image of you and Togami Byakuya in the midst of a romance session! Just look at, the way he so tenderly embraces you!" If Naegi sinks any further down he'll be a corpse on the classroom floor. Kuwata coughs more muffled laughs that throb his temples raw. "It is unacceptable! I will have to send this to administration at once!"

"Ah, just sit your ass down, bro," calls Oowada, snatches the paper into a crumpling fist. With the other, he catches hold of the pressed uniform back to jolt him into the desk chair beside him.

Barks still continue to lash him, gashing wounds upon anyone who should be around him so crude, but Naegi's heartbeat's in his ears and he cannot even dare himself to dare break his sight to the room's other side; and he needn't look at all, even, because  _feeling it_ is enough.

A corpse on the classroom floor seems a delightful gameshow prize, he thinks the sudden.

Four more days.


	25. Chapter 25

Togami Byakuya is out for blood.

Those  _stupid_ boys and their  _stupid_ mouths, always shouting, cheering, hooting. He does not remember a day of quiet during classtime breaks nor meals nor recess in elementary. It makes him embarrassed for the entire male race, and he'd only had his point proven to his scoffing of the concern one morning, after breakfast had ended in yolk dripping from noses and six toast slices that had in fact landed butter side down every time, and there'd been a comment tossed his way about still liking men anyway, so he should shut his Goddamned trap.

Veracious, perhaps. But not ever men of this flavor, who interrupt his time spent admiring fanned fingernails and muting the space invader at his nape with their discordance. Something or other about a drawing this morning. His eyes would roll were they worth the effort of it.

Then  _that one's_ hollering at the other side, loud in a way not rowdy teenager but rather pure pique of a Cadillac's paintjob scratched, baseballs sailed through plate glass, a searing trip to the restroom after she'd testified cleanliness. Togami's never so much minded the crew cut whip tongued boy in his class; rule breaking is only sexy if he's the one doing it, not by others who clown about so foolishly to his endless vexation.

But that one's hollering, and Togami would have to revoke his gold star petty drama lover card if he were to say he didn't glance over to tune in.

Less interested is he knowing that that imbecile is once again attention's center, and he's induced to a close spewing in memory of yesterday's dripping dinner theater. More interested is he once he hears his own name tossed in, but in the same note he's centered by outrage's pitchfork tongs to absorb the message.

"Just look at, the way he so tenderly embraces you!"

Togami would like more to tenderly embrace a hunting blade to the pitiful little mutt's jugular. The scene gives way to anticlimax in the lecturer being thrown harsh to a seat, clearing his sight path once others follow suit in a direct route toward the desk by the window. He  _feels_ it, the way Naegi refuses to meet his stare. Bitchmove.

It's impossible to escape the run-ins with this delinquent, it seems to him, post even embarrassment after  _embarrassment_. That's all he can take Naegi for now, a stumbling, muttering, low functioning one at best. He'd glared a housefire at him in that classroom, lingering after their teacher's instruction to open their textbooks once she enters. Each glance spared back throughout the period grants him a sweating mess beneath. Though his intimidation works faultlessly always, he'd rather now it be battled gainst to grant him rightful consequence. He's never gifted it, even once the next bell gathers them all in cacophony toward the cafeteria, Naegi ducking out to the hall in an armload of books and a mouthful of compunction.

It's impossible to escape, though, proving so once wrath has mellowed the  _slightest_ and he's able to walk toward his dorm in dignity all around. The heels that clack timid behind him are halted to a yelping when he turns so abrupt to order them away at his room's approach. Fukawa blinks behind those offensively ugly lenses, meeting two and two to make five in her dream clouds for eyes next.

"Ah, B-Byakuya wants me to go get him lunch, right?! It's hard to be so beautiful on an empty stom-stomach!" Then the heels are a race past him toward the latent noise and simmering scents, and he's poised to click into his room with an echoing lock til a louder reverberation calls his curiosity back.

There's a girly shriek he cannot for the life of him decide the source of between the two; but he'd quite like to end that life of him in the sight he takes of Fukawa's skirt leapt so far up her thighs in her crash upon the hallway floor. More so atop the other who's crashed upon the hallway floor, mouth trembling to a pinch of brows. Togami sneers so viciously to him, at his gallon load apologies from having been knocked into, though it's a touch past amusing to spy out his blanch faced expression at the scissor point aimed toward the hand he offers in assistance.

She rises without the help, a single jump to feet trained strong, says brash in stance, "Watch where you're walkin', Macarena!", then is a jet in her deft bolt after the handsome man in her peripheral at the corridor's other end. Naegi rests a palm to the wall, winded past viable.

Tongue clicks so slicing resurrect his posture. "Come back to make a fool of yourself again?"

Hesitant is his shake to the head, perhaps in the decision of the question's rhetoric pose, but chooses wrong regardless and moves onward, "I came to...to apologize, and...um, well-" He lifts one side of his coat by the bottom edge, flips it one-eighty to spill its innards. Glass shatters snow from his protective inner pocket.

"...Give you the lightbulb I bought you this morning." He's the gall to tempt a sheepish smile. "Ah, I'm sorry. I'll get you another-"

"Don't waste your money," Togami bites. The other flinches, drops his pocket righted. He feels the urge to continue on, though (a first time for everything, evidently) cannot find the words, the will. Naegi watches on, awkward as get out, bites a lip to press from it, "...I didn't draw that picture, it-"

"Would you just leave well enough alone, for God's sake?" Togami wonders when the hell the issue had been demoted to  _well enough,_ or when he'd sunk into this gelatin mold about time that moves so subtle. He shakes himself loosened. "It wouldn't be the first time you've proved yourself useless, after last night's little performance."

Togami watches the cogs spin, the meek  _performance..?_ in knitted perplexity before final pieces snap together and the dollhouse is built, and Naegi's enough mortification to match the sweet little girl who finds the residents have all been stripped for parts (a Christmas morning memory he'd call upon to anyone's invasive questioning of just what the hell's wrong with him, because Komaru still hasn't apologized so many years past and he'd waited  _months_  for that knock off dream house- but  _God damn it all,_ Togami's knee deep in a psyche that doesn't belong to him nor anywhere near-)

"-was just  _water,_ I was trying to save you from getting beat up in front of the whole school."

Togami blinks. One, because he's forgotten what tune this discussion started out to. Two, because the last person to say they were saving him had ended it with  _a seeeat next to meee, handsome, ahaha-_

"It's rather impressive the lengths to which you'll go for this obsession you've got with me." A start pricks his skin, yet the orator goes forth, "The bookstore, the lamp, this so called  _saving._ The  _artwork_ in class today, entering my hotel room unannounced. You're a stalker, very nearly. I'd suggest you seek some help."

His eyes close to a huff, reduce him to missing the peculiar twist sent his way. "What was that last thing?"

Togami blinks. One, because- because, well,  _holy shit._

The knocks to his echoing slam behind chambers dark go ignored the time to follow.


	26. Chapter 26

He spends six minutes tapping his hands to the door marked  _Togami Byakuya_ , calling protests that fade more futile each passing second. Forehead to wood, his palm thumps one last, leads to silence in his dead inhale.

He's just... _confused really fucking confused._ Time to himself would do him well, though he's swept into togetherness at lunchtime's dismissal when raucousness returns from trekking through courtyard sizzle.

The top corner seat is empty for the last two blocks, the spot behind it filled in anxiety that shouts accusations toward all who pass her along class' final emptying. He realizes illfortune is not solo in bringing the pang to his gut, and makes up for it with two servings of curry rice at dinner.

Crossed legs to bed, thick book open to them. Chatter over the evening meal had led to his seat neighbor's invitation to do homework together, and he's been sweltering ever since she'd accepted, waiting now in quiet review to save himself from looking the fool in her presence. Forever is he a fool to face all that's happened the days about him, and he's thought time and time over that he's simply having the worst life of his life, and whatever Togami had been on about will resolve itself soon enough. Weighted, an exhale.

The tracklist fades to the disc's third song from the modest box stereo on his dresser. His pen head taps absently to the rhythm. He'd meant to say  _Europe_ , not Egypt, and he's glad he knows it now, particularly once heavensent knuckles puncture the beat of pop punk, and he's all tangled in the middle to push the book from his lap and stand.

A last checking to the white sleeves of each underarm, a breath out, and he pulls the door opened with a lamb's smile, though it drops to swallowed bleating to take in the newcomer; the farmhand's got the shears out.

"Naegi," says Togami.

"...Togami?" says Naegi.

Staleness wraps them. Demands are met to be let in, as he sees no better option than placating a madman, knob pushing in a hush that bares two souls.

The lean downward to him is nothing if not business casual, and he's stunned silent to the lips swift upon his.

"Hm." Togami wastes several moments in blinking, waiting, finger to chin elbow to hand. "Alright, it isn't that. Strip for me."

 _"What?"_ Boggle around goes eyes through skull with Naegi's gaping. Slim fingers begin at top neck buttons, leaving clavicle bare by the time his own frantic insistence halts it. "Wha...what the hell is going on? Did you just... _kiss me?"_

"Yes," he says, answering light as though he's been asked his want for tea, "I'm trying to get rid of you."

"Get rid of... _what?!_ Togami, what's gotten into you?"

There comes no reply, just the brush closer, the push of him up to wall, and he's glancing up in face a constant fire all over again to their vicinity merged so near, lips teasing to his ear, his jaw, his neck. He cannot fathom the idea of going further. He cannot stand the knock that meets the door.

Togami pulls away from him, exuding a similar aversion in his yank of the knob. The pretty girl behind it raises fingers to wag in greeting.

"Fuck off," he says, and Naegi catches the last fraction of her wilted face before the door is slammed in it.

" _Togami,"_ is a close pleading. "You're acting crazy. We hardly even knew each other before yesterday, and now you're all over me? What is  _wrong_ with you?"

 _"What's wrong_ with me, Naegi Makoto, is  _you!_ " His shout echoes, point steady to his chest. Green eyes drag down toward it. "I can't stop running into you, I can't stop thinking about you. Every time we meet, it has to consist of some major debacle, why is that? Can we not coexist? Is something planting these occurrences to ensure we cannot forget each other, cannot leave the other's mind?"

"Uh..." Shoulders pinch him smaller. Glances dart to either side, stubborn, skittish. "Are those...are those rhetorical questions?"

" _Makoto."_

His hands clench trembling. "A-Alright, I...I don't know, okay? I guess it  _is_ a little strange...usually my luck isn't this bad..."

Snap. Drag. "You think it bad luck to have met me?"

"No! I-I just, I meant-"

"So then it's good?" He's stepped back enough to be appropriate, arms together, fixed by a perplexed suspicion. To him it sounds like a begged compliment than anything else.

Naegi soaks himself in the  _awkwardness_ , yet again yet again yet again, shifts feet along flooring and hands to pant pockets. "So...you think there's, like... _huh?"_


	27. Chapter 27

"I  _think_ you're the rash that won't go away."

He feels himself rather brash this evening, rather asinine, a tad, to be pouring himself this way into Naegi Makoto's mug. It'd been a flush debate with himself, retinas stinging in the hours long sear of computer screen light, whether to take his theories head on into testing, or merely, believing. He still isn't positive the outcome to either choice, though he knows now that Naegi Makoto has lips that taste like salted caramel, and that kissing him had not be the key to resetting whatever sick time loop they've been thrown into.

Fully the afternoon had been spent on researching, on finding time and time again that nasty little bitch named  _0 RESULTS_ in his questioning.  _i think i re_ backspacebackspacebackspace _i remember someone i have never talked to. why can i remember things about someone i dont know. how does kirigiri know my car didnt break down when i dont even drive._

"A...rash?" blinks up at him. He tips his head backward in volcanic displeasure.

"Listen, Makoto," he says. "You and I are not what we seem."

His head tilts. Magma rushes to the surface.

The bed behind him gains a heavy guest, glasses shoving to forehead in a scrub of face to palms. Techno caresses his aching bones, lifts his vision up again to order it silenced.

"It's not  _racket,"_ Naegi argues back, walks over to his dresser to quiet the volume regardless. "Maizono got me this CD for Christmas last year. She said she was sorry she didn't get me something better, since she spent so much time finding perfect Hanukkah presents for her friend- you know, that girl in our grade who's always wearing gloves. I was fine with it though, I really like-"

"The Ramones," Togami finishes, staring at him a deer to headlights. "Maizono didn't get you this CD, Makoto,  _I_ got you this CD." Next goes sapphire fire to roll within liner. "And she and her  _friend_ are fucking, you nearsighted breast loving idiot."

 _"What?"_  His mouth copycats the round disc now stuck on an index. "They're together?!"

"Why do you sound more astonished by _that_  than by the fact that we've known each other a thousand different Goddamned times, and I'm head over my heels in love with your imbecilic, raunchy, day ruining ass?!" Natural- he's stood to emphasize his plight, hand to chest in demanding. "Why are you so  _fucking stupid? Why?_ Why, Makoto?!"

And Naegi, the nearsighted day ruining idiot, says, "Wait...you're in love with me?"

Hands clasp before his mouth. Breath in. Breath out.  _Eins zwei drei vier f_ _ü_ _nf sechs sieben acht neun zehn._

"You're in love with me," he repeats, conviction to inflection. "We're dating, married, what have you. Can't you feel it? Don't you remember?"

Thin lips purse together. "Um." Those eyes, hazel, sheepish, stunning. "...No, not really. I'm sorry."

 _Breath in breath out fingers gripping blond a pain._ "Why the  _fuck not?!_ Why can't you remember, but I can? Every moment we've spent together,  _years._ We've lived endless lives together, Makoto. You like lime sherbet, not orange, your sister has a Hello Kitty motorcycle helmet, we went to college together, with all your  _moronic_ _friends_ who I cannot bear a minute spent around." A step forward pushes the other to a step backward. "The  _diner,_ Makoto, tell me you remember the diner. And you know something? I will admit it- my car didn't break down outside. I saw you walk in, and I was dying to talk to you, because I could swear I'd seen your stupid, stupid, handsome face somewhere before. And I was right- I had. Right here, and all the other times we've woken up with nothing but vague ideas."

His hands rest before him, reaching almost, silent. He could not would not take his eyes off the other for anything, not now not ever.

" _Please,_ Makoto." And to that those hands  _do_ reach, a single touch out, do shake with the stench of desperation.

"Um," Naegi says, "Have...Have you been staying hydrated, Togami? It's been really really hot this week, you might have-"

"You don't remember," he scoffs, void of humor through the core yet mocking it dry. "You really don't remember. And here I am, making an absolute  _idiot_ of myself for someone thrice that."

The irritation has since transferred, he senses, left him with his empty breath and Naegi with the curl that takes his tone unsettled. "...You know, you insult me a lot for someone who's apparently in love with me. You don't have to love me if you don't want to. I mean, it doesn't seem like you do."

"Makoto," drawls  _again,_ a prayer. Togami cannot recall his last blink, sliced open by the fear of squandering such a moment in which could be spent to unison of heart and soul. "It isn't that I want to, it's that I  _must._ I must love you, because...because you're  _mine,_ and I...I  _like_ you, Makoto. I like that you talk so Goddamned much. I like that you sing in the shower. It reminds me you're  _there,_ and you're  _alive_." A signature- his arms go to a crossed rest, forcing vision away from vulnerability. "And I like your moronic friends. I like when Kirigiri comes over for movies on Friday. I like when your sister talks our ears off about whatever interest she's chosen that week. I like when Kuwata visits, and he holds our children upside down by the ankles. It's ridiculous _,_ and they love it, and he's great at being the  _cool_  uncle who lets them do whatever we say no to."

Whether it is that exhaustion of lungs or of heart is the color spread to his face, neither could tell, could think upon it. That voice goes to a hush, leaves quivering on late August oaks. "I like the way your face lights up when I come home. No one's ever loved me so much, not the way you do-  _never..._ never the way you do."

Every muscle to him's a fifty pound barbell. Tight, struggling.

He cannot, for his own poor dumb self, he cannot meet the other's look to him. Too mesmerizing, too torturing.

"Togami," he says, shining reflections of hope in his glossed stare. "...I think you should go lie down."

He'd like to comply to that for all his days to come.


	28. Chapter 28

Three noons remaining to final exams is a warzone.

"-hues in the color wheel. It is equally as important to the grand scheme of balance. And what complements gr-?"

"Red!" the girl at the front most table leaps to answer,  _again,_ long white ponytails chasing her shoulders.

The teacher, hands resting against one another before her chest, forces a smile to grant it correct. Test review carries on, more questions, more enthusiasm to meet them, more cheeks drooling to desks from the back corners.

Scuffed sneakers rest to the shared table. "I wonder how she'll react if I stand up right now and say, hey, I'm just here for the credits, I don't give a shit about what colors look good with blue."

Naegi's chin lifts from his palm to move it; "I don't think she'd be very surprised."

Laze dusts the mood of the afternoon. Staff had given in to the tempt of sun glints, and the row of windows aside their spot sit open to drink in fresh breeze. Leaves taunt. He sighs.

"-praised for leading the realism movement. Not that it'll be on the exam, but can anyone name that 1866 Courbet painting?"

" _L'Origine du Monde,"_ Naegi says under his breath.

" _L'Origine du Monde!"_ shouts up from the front row, met in a yet another tight lipped agreement.

Continuum goes along the lesson. Between them, Kuwata plants a v-browed wonder to his seat mate. "How'd you know that?"

"Just..." he answers in scrunched eyes, "remembered."

Wind whispers through treetops. The late afternoon has begun its cool down to lead into dusk, lets braids fall loose and sleeves leave elbows. Their instructor, tone varnished by exasperation, tells them to break into a group study. From his side, he feels feet drop from their perch on the tabletop, and Kuwata's suddenly leant to husk inches from his face. "What's up with you today, Naegi? You're all topsy turkey."

One pupil shifts to his bored peripheral, staring each a long while whilst others (of which none belong to their desired friend group, as Woodshop had been filled to the brim and the only still partially manly arts class on the list was Elements of Art I) bustle to arrange themselves for mimicking intense study. His elbows go to a bend mirrored, supporting his jaw equal.

"I'm just thinking..." he promises. "...Last night was just, uh, really weird. Togami-"

"Ugh,  _Togami."_ Kuwata marries spine to chair back indolent as ever, huffing from the lungs direct. "That guy's a real piece of work. I tried to apologize for that little tiff at dinner the other night, and you know what he said to me?  _Han Solo dies-_ the hell's that even mean? He's on Endor, ya lame ass."

Still the chatter boils on about the room. From it, the opposite side long, approaches heel taps that twist them each into a blind scrambling to pull out some form of work to peer down at; they're only settled by the sight of her, not their teacher but perhaps close enough, as his lax lasts mere seconds before he's a mess all over again for the stranger's offering.

"Maizono mentioned you've been in search of this," the girl says, you know, that girl in our grade who's always wearing gloves. At one of them rests a thumb-thick paperback, and he takes it in starshine glory to set sight on the front.

Such length is spent in awe at the book, that once he's the chivalry to spout gratitude, the earner has already heel clacked her way back to her far corner seat, nose aimed firmly to the composition notebook in her lap.

"Angel Kiss Heaven Star," Kuwata reads from it over his shoulder. The puzzled glance ends with his smirking. " _Pfft-_ sounds pretty gay."

Naegi cannot force the ill will to frown. "It's about this girl, who meets this guy named Tomomi, and they're...they're soulmates, and keep denying it while they, like, uh, fight and stuff." A thumb runs along the cover. "Anyway, um, it's set in space, which is really cool. This is newest volume, I've been looking for it everywhere."

"Gotta be honest, Naegs, you're borin' me to tears," his friend tells him so kindly. "I'd rather be listening to Kurosawa go on about color balance and sh- Ah, how are you today, Kurosawa-sensei? Just working hard over here, as always."

The art teacher passes him in a roll of eyes, taps his chair along the way to order all legs to the floor. Naegi smiles, slight, flips through the pages a quick note to intake their fresh bought scent.

"Togami isn't so bad, Kuwata," is his aged response to a conversation long killed off. He's granted a stare, to which he gives back, "He really likes it when you lift our kids up by the ankles."

"When I  _what_ your  _who?"_

The question rests unheard. Mouth puckers, pen tip scrawls bored. Naegi traces a finger down the jaw of the man painted noble on the book's front, aims a broad beam to the back row corner. Eyes flick to him briefly, return to notebook lines as he does his own prospects. The book draws into his chest in a dream world sigh, cotton candy and chocolate chewing gum and one thousand nighttimes tasting of mint petroleum.

Hot cinnamon flavors his heartache. Still, he smiles.


	29. Chapter 29

Had they been asked their favorite school subjects, they'd supply three responses; lunch, recess, dismissal. The third wraps about them now, coils around the fleeing of a hundred students in palm raised joy. A crossing guard stands in the midst of the sea, hollering the same notion as every other day where the the pathway crossed is taken in reckless jaunts. Dry grass crunches beneath little leather shin-highs.

He walks the field ahead in slow steps, moves eyes about in a thin scanning wonder. A dozen hop along the sidewalk, guided in gentle clasping and questions of their day's greatness. The rest gather in the sistering playground to await guardians twenty minutes more at work, ten minutes more in traffic.

"No, you didn', stop lying!"

All the way from his spot at the outskirts he hears the shrill; the girl's perched atop the monkey bars (upright, this time, not as the day last week in which he'd overheard a bet she couldn't hang upside down on them, and a shove down to woodchips had followed  _haha, Maizono wears Hello Kitty underwear!)_ smoothing shoulder length blue in fleece gloves. The boy seemingly always leeching aside her swings from knuckles wrapped around one rung, and argues, "Yeah huh! All the front ones fell right out when he punched me. I had to put 'em back in myself."

"That's not how teeths work, Kuwata!"

"Yeah huh! My uncle's a dentist." Togami snorts internally in his approach closer to the benches by them. That blond boy must have a harem of uncles to call upon, or at the least a single polymath. Last week, he'd been on tour with One OK Rock. "An' Naegi was there. Right, Naegi?"

Attention shifts to the one standing below, stirring cedar about with a sneaker. He blinks upward, green eyes too vast to leave hearts intact blank in so clearly having not listened to a thing said. "Yeah."

The prissy girl huffs into folded arms, and he glances back to the other's frantic start. Wrong answer. The quick attempt of his  _but-but-but!_ is halted by a weight crashing miles quick into his back.

"Makoto!" It's another girl, one he's seen before in her pink coat that doubles her girth and nose frosted a snow cold rose. After an  _oof_ and stumble forward, the other turns to her, Togami watching quiet his every movement from his own spot standing afront an ice marred bench. He knows him to be in his grade, though appears more three below with his stunted height. He knows him to be named Naegi Makoto from his frequent eavesdropping on afternoon conversations. He knows him to be the center of all spotlights' drama, energetic at recess and shy shy shy to strangers' speech, always sharing always laughing always comforting those stricken by scraped knees or low quiz grades. He's...a character. Togami likes watching him much more than the ones on television.

But the girl, she's placed herself between it all, shouting that, "Makoto!" in her voice sticky with youth. "Chieko's mom came and got her, so you have to be the other princess ninja now."

Dirt coughs from a heavy drop of feet. A tongue prods out the tall boy's grinning mouth toward her. "First graders can't hang out with forth graders, stupidhead."

From the smile plastered to his face, Togami would guess he means no malice by the comment, but indigence colors her pissy puff cheeked reaction anyhow. She stamps a foot to it (and he cannot stall his focus from glancing to the hearts and stars that light up). " _You're_  a stupidhead, Kuwaga! You think Haruki can talk!"

The name's yet to have been tossed around for his perception, so he isn't sure who the supposed silent other  _is,_ knows only the stance Kuwata takes on to combat the twerp. "He  _does_ talk, I heard him myself. Member, Naegi?" A turn goes to the witness called again to the stand, who bites the inside of his cheek in a glance between them. "We were playing with him in your backyard, and he said,  _don't tell Komaru, but she pets me too hard and I think she's annoying."_

"He did not say that, Kuwaga, you...big mean stupid meanie!"

"Leave her alone, Kuwata," chimes the girl hovering over them, legs swaying down to pointed Mary-Janes. She's the feministic hero always to these situations, Togami's noted, seen likewise the way her defendant glows with such delight at the feel of a true big sister type. He cannot blame her, judging by the pair of goons who are so quick to tease her soured. The hollow headed goon stands back laughing, clutching at the middle, and it drives fists tighter clenched than any quips had.

One unfurls, he observes close, crouching at the knees to collect the tight crunching snow packed around the jungle gym's metal legs. It compacts into one hand, tiny and furious and gloved by cheap cotton kitten faces, swings back at the shoulder the same moment the target's regained himself enough to dodge.

Bullseye is the chest of his peacoat. He is not taken aback so by its force, but rather the audacity. The stun that snow would not have the midair sense to melt dead before contacting him.

Hands leave their grip on backpack straps to brush the ice crumbs from fine black fabric. And he knows what's next coming, because he'd heard the gasp, seen in muted colors the jump down from above and trouncing over his way.

"Are you okay?!" Maizono asks him in concern saccharine enough to rot his bicuspids. Her attempt to touch him is shirked in a violent jerk away, frown stealing her demure face.

"Go away," Togami tells her, the most hardassed ten year old to walk the planet.

She steps back, sun glinting off the studs on her white boots. That catches his attention well past the aching look in her nurse's pupils.

"I'm sorry!" sounds from just behind her, and just behind  _him_ cowers little kitten faces clutching his jacket, mouth silent to quivering a modest EKG. "I didn't mean to hit you, it was a accident. I'm reallyreallyreally sorry."

The apology bothers him more than the reasoning. He cannot imagine allowing blame to befall him for another's wrongdoing, cannot imagine having a protective sibling to do so willingly. All his older brothers and sisters care about is themselves. Togami thinks that a dashing way to live.

His fingers go back to clasping about his bag straps, glaring down the quartet alike. He'd like to point out that Naegi's an idiot for lying in such a fashion, as if he hadn't seen the whole plot play out start to gory finish, but it'll have to be saved for the next time he's sure is to come in which Naegi behaves like an idiot, a knightly heroic idiot with pretty eyes and alacrity to give a starving stranger his last slice of bread, because he's ushered along to a swivel around at a pattering.

"Come along, young master," the second most knightly and delicate person in his world says so soft to him, offers a hand aged in ginger touches that he's no reluctance to grasp. "Have you said goodbye to your friends?"

"No," Togami answers as he's led from the lively vibe of tag and make believe to the parking lot behind it. None too certain is he what's been chuckled at, nor what  _candor_ means when Pennyworth answers the demand to know, but he hasn't the care to ponder more at it once he's been buckled in and his bag's taken to rest aside, the chauffeur specialty Maybach rolling easy to the early afternoon street.

Out the tinted back window rests his long stare. It locks in a loop around for a day's final prying, hooks a trout's choke with the way he's caught another's. Naegi blinks, and the car is gone from sight.

"That boy is mean," says the tug on his hand. He snaps his head from piercing the emptied side road to glance at her airy cheery girly self. "He always just watches us!"

Back to that road drops hazels long, aged a millennia in a single decade. "I think we should invite him to play with us tomorrow."

Lips pout, though the discussion drizzles as the sun sifts snow, and the tug increases to drag him toward the looping slide's ladder.

Breath in. Breath out.


	30. Chapter 30

"And then, Tanaka said, she said  _hamp_ sters, and I said it's  _ham_ sters- no P -and I was right, 'cause I knew that."

Asphalt takes motion to drawling tires. The afternoon's peaked a high rise hot in late May, air blooming fresh to the opened front window at his bared elbows. Traffic struggles at the intersection outside the elementary school zone, five cars all attempting the same loop around to exit another way the same moment. Horns blare. He cruises the straight way out, another minute of glancing past the hood, clicking shifting huffing into comfort behind him. To intake it, he adjusts the rear view mirror in a hand, smiles summer blossoms at the breathtaking reflections.

"You're so smart, honey," he says, spills sight back ahead at a rare wave forward from a stilled windshield. He offers his own gesture back in appreciation, puts both hands to the wheel to guide the Corolla along warm midday.

"I'm am smart, too," is insisted from the carseat of kicking legs beside the other. At the front, Naegi smirks again to say, "Yes, Yuki, you're very smart."

His days as of late run brisk, hectic by nature though tang in the mellow of regimen collected, time gone past. Delighted eyes follow all along the bustle outside the windows, taken by life's presence within others so colorful; a girl glides the sidewalk dips on rollerblades; arm around her waist, a woman's treated to pre lunch dessert. Leaves twitch, breeze rolls. Naegi sighs,  _breathes,_ because he  _can,_ soaks up sunlight to his gold washed skin.

The radio host proclaims its the hour to  _roll out an oldie._ Fingers tap atop the steering wheel, fall a moment to twist the dial right. " _Ohh, whoa,"_ hums he beneath breath. " _Now and never, baby, love me nooow, ohh-"_

"Dad," brings his gaze to the mirror anew. Glazed blue eyes look on to him in aversion. He ducks into a laugh. The dial twists further.

" _Oh, baby, I miss your kiss-!"_

_"Daaad."_ Little hands go to cover his face, thin wired lenses pushing up to hairline.

Another snorting chuckle. "Alright, alright," he concedes to the volume's lowering. "I can't believe you're already old enough to be embarrassed of me. I'm so proud."

The car glides to the lot of Wednesday after school routine. A last glance behind spots they've already tugged belts from locks by the time he's shifted to park, spots how hands wiser assist in the ever oppressing carseat latch, and he's stepped out to catch the released convict up in his arms before he's to dart past. Yukichi whines in a way so endlessly dramatic that his captor just  _has_  to laugh, bounces him to a shoulder lean while freed arm goes to beckon the other along. And where a hand makes to tousle, he's tight in reluctance to accept just how high he's to lift it. He recalls fond the headrush of coos found toward the tiniest clothing fathomable, faces now one viable to reach the cabinets better than he. It chokes him in nostalgia. Joy could not possibly fill him further.

"Go ahead, pick out what you want," he says, once they've been met in the conditioned hold of the inside, where he'd thanked in thick truth the stranger who'd held the door, complimented what  _cuuute_ boys he's got. The weight in his arms has been liberated, though kept a death grip's watch upon him for that sweet, sweet toddler inclination to wander. "Auntie Kyouko said she wants licorice."

From beside him, his eldest scans the convenience store shelves of snacks in the deepest scrutiny. Each midweek afternoon finds them all the same, no shifts to meet or quotas to carry, placed in an uptown apartment's modest living room for tea (and lemonade, but from teacups still, because it's fun to be a grown up when its all make believe) and a sweet to match. Naegi's a sucker for something so bland as a fixed repetition, and his son the same in their weekly decision of chocolate cookies large as a compact disc and soft as heaven's gates, though he thinks the one he awaits hours for a text from every Wednesday morning to choose between scones or skittles or Sno Caps serves a role model for the debater by his hip now.

Velvet eyes trace along his profile, round still as a babyface should, dangled to maturity by the frames sitting on a nose (that'd been granted after two weeks of first grade had shown off his squinting from an alphabetized far row seat). Lashes bat within them, trained along rows of pastry labels. A grandeur taps along himself. He'd sigh were it more appropriate a timing for admiration over life. Appropriate as the feeling hits on a silent lake at dawn's kiss, hits to gentle gazes over sleeping faces before one's own bed is claimed for the night, sunk into so charming. Not so much in a Doutou convenience store, though he supposes its the rush of recollection that's been sitting in his stomach's pit the whole fine day, and when he does outlet that life loving sigh it garners the tipped head glance he'd been loving so.

Tomomi's head tilts left, to which his own matches counter sided. He smiles when he's given a demanding little, "What?", laughs into shrugged shoulders to his silence a long drawn moment.

"Ah, nothing," he says to its end. A light strand flicks once above. The front door swings a grieved forecast to the inside a moment before a dead shut. "You just remind me so much of your father sometimes."

Harsher slanted goes that questioning quirk, and he's hot at the throat when he must again take speech. He looks down to the attention commanded by pats at the knees. "Oh, good job, Yuki," he says, takes the pair of cellophaned cookies from him and is corralled toward the counter at his insistence. Naegi laughs, again, always in the cherry petals of his lungs, checks behind only once he's set purchases up and youngest to hip. Easy relief is finding his trail met, tiny fingers offering thin mints and a package of since forgotten Red Vines to the countertop. Eternal affection pours from the pet down his summer shine locks.

He exhales golden to a placement back to the car. The plastic bag takes the passenger seat, pressing palm to its headrest in his reverse.

A vast inhale is his finality to feeling. There seems no true closure about what he's grown into, adulthood with its unending hours, up all nights and the next day to tax. He misses the  _one week left to summer break, two days til the weekend,_ where time markers were an oasis to sprint forth unto. Pushing through the rest of the week is one that goes  _on_ , record scratched, calendars thick as Britannica.

Chattering meets his cruise from the backseat, more about the escapades of that and this in class today, more wishes thrown to be of age for attendance. He smiles to it, and thinks that he's been meaning to read an encyclopedia one of these days, thinks Dee Dee and Joey have bluechip enough cords to endure that looping scratch, anyhow.

Naegi Makoto thinks he quite quite quite adores the life he's been gifted. Naegi Makoto thinks he's got it all figured out.

"Ah, shit."

Naegi Makoto thinks he's... _on his way_ to figuring it all out, and he's only knocked a notch lower because he'd been too distracted by the beauty of existence to take the car slinking to pass around him into account, previous to the lean on the horn that greets the short stop of both attempting the same merged turn.

He's sure it doesn't have to be a major issue, and he'd wave him onward to apology had the driver side door of the dark Mercedes not pressed open to confrontation.

At least he'll have a good story over tea today, he opines, judging by the flavorful character the hotass storming toward his car looks already to be.

Naegi tips his head back, and sighs into a grin.


End file.
